News On Las Conchas H20

Rocky Pt. DEsalination planned
Drinking seawater in Puerto Peñasco
Partnership's plant is to serve 600 beachfront homes in Sonora
By Gabriela Rico
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona Published: 02.20.2008

More than 600 beachfront homes in Puerto Peñasco will have drinkable tap water — from the sea — by the end of the year.
In a first-of-its-kind partnership in the Sonoran city also known as Rocky Point, the Las Conchas Home Owners Association has signed a contract with Mexico City-based Grupo Agua de Mexico to build and operate a desalination plant for the housing development.
Residents of the community, in the southern part of Puerto Peñasco, held a groundbreaking ceremony last week. Construction of the plant is expected to be completed this fall.

Tucsonan Jean Steward, president of the homeowners group, said the project has been in the works for several years. Homeowners collected or purchased the equipment and materials and turned everything over the Grupo Agua de Mexico for construction.
Residents will not incur any costs for the plant's construction but will pay a monthly fee for the water, she said.
The service will cost about $65 a month, plus usage charges, Steward said.
Currently, residents pay a minimum of $10 per quarter for water and then $20 to $500 monthly depending on how much they use, she said. With the new plant, residents will no longer have to buy bottled water to drink, Steward noted.
When complete, the plant will have the capacity to accommodate 1,000 homes, the expected size of the development once it's built out, Steward said.
"We're very excited," she said.

Desalination removes dissolved minerals from seawater through reverse osmosis — a technology used in some home water purifiers — or distillation.
The majority of desalination plants are in the Middle East — 60 percent of the world's 7,500 operating plants, according to the California Coastal Commission.
The technology's growing popularity is not without its critics.
Environmentalists point out that desalination is energy-intensive, that small marine animals can be sucked into the desalination tubes during the water extraction process and that brine is deposited back into the ocean after the water is treated.
Still, interest in turning salty seawater into drinking water is growing.
In August 2007, the largest inland desalination plant in the world opened in El Paso, to benefit Fort Bliss, according to AlterNet, a magazine that advocates for the environment.
On a smaller scale, a 1-million-gallon-per-day desalination plant is under development in La Paz, Baja California Sur. Seven Trent Services, based in Torrance, Calif., will build the plant for the Maravia Country Club Estates, a 5,000-acre tourist, residential and golf community.
For Puerto Peñasco residents, access to clean water had become a concern as development in the oceanfront community shows no signs of slowing.

For the past several years, water has been severely restricted to homes in Las Conchas during the drought-ridden summer months, Steward said.
● Contact reporter Gabriela Rico at 573-4232 or grico@azstarnet.com.