Catalonia is experiencing a drought episode that, both due to its duration and intensity and its surface area, is already historic. The most worrying thing is that there is no sign of regression in the short term. The accumulated rainfall deficits in coastal and pre-coastal areas are of such magnitude that several extremely humid months would be necessary just to return to normal conditions. With part of the territory in an emergency phase and restrictions, more measures are not ruled out if the situation worsens.
With this backdrop, Diálogos La Vanguardia held a debate with experts to analyze the necessary measures to manage the current drought and future alternatives. In the round table, organized in collaboration with Acciona, Samuel Reyes, director of the Catalan Water Agency (ACA); M.ª Carmen García Panadero, vice president of the Spanish Association of Desalination and Reutilization (AEDyR) and general director of the Spanish Society of Water Treatment (SETA); Javier Martín Vide, professor of Physical Geography and former director of the Water Research Institute of the University of Barcelona (UB), and Juan Carlos Blázquez, director of Acciona Water Business Development.
The current situation, Martín Vide stressed, is exceptional, it has no parallel. “Pluviometrically, we would have to go back 200 years to find an analogous situation in the city of Barcelona,” explained the climatologist, who also advanced that the seasonal predictions a few months ahead, which have a high level of uncertainty, do not draw a rainy horizon. And although this drought will end, he also warned that an episode like the current one may be more frequent in the future. “We will have to be prepared,” he concluded.
Hydrological planning is revealed as a determining factor to manage times of low rainfall. And this planning, the speakers agreed, must be carried out when the drought has not yet occurred. “We have to learn from what is happening to us. We cannot continue letting the drought lead us to an emergency,” said García Panadero. The UB professor expressed himself in similar terms, who advocated working “in times of good rainfall.” “Otherwise, we enter what has been called the ‘hydro-illogical’ cycle,” he stated.
“What has not been done, has not been done, and now we are suffering,” added the Acciona manager, who recalled that an infrastructure, whether a desalination plant or a treatment plant, is not built overnight. “We are late,” admitted the director of the ACA, who described as “a toast to the sun” the plan that the agency designed in 2008, with investments of 6,000 million that could not be met due to the high debt suffered by both the ACA and Aigües. Ter-Llobregat (ATL), public company of the Generalitat. It was not until 2019 when, according to Reyes, they began to “draw projects and do their homework.” In 2022, the ACA had a piggy bank of 540 million, necessary to undertake works without debt. 90% of this amount has already been committed, and the little remainder that remains is now being allocated to emergency works, Reyes explained.
Among the works that were not planned and that are being urgently addressed is the purification of the Besòs, with an investment of 150 million, which will provide 80 hectometres, building deep wells in the headwaters of the Ter and Llobregat and regeneration actions in Gavà, Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Figueres and L’Escala “What we need is to spend little water and invest a lot,” said Reyes, for whom the “most urgent” thing is a general awareness of the situation we are in. “We all have to pitch in; “We will make the investments, but we must be efficient in use,” he concluded. The speakers agreed on the need to do pedagogy so that people know what is behind the tap. “We have to take people to the facilities, let them see them and know what it costs,” declared Blázquez, while Martín Vide considered “good information in cases of common good” to be completely obligatory.
Even if you had all the money in the world on the table, the solutions are not immediate. “But you have to put it in,” Blázquez emphasized. For García Panadero, solving water scarcity involves a mix of solutions, starting with optimizing networks and consumption and continuing by recycling every last drop, with a “robust regulatory framework.” “And once we have all this, we will complement it with desalination,” he stated. In this sense, the SETA board and the head of Acciona’s Water Business Development highlighted the role of desalination plants.
desalination plants. “We have known technology for 60 years,” said García Panadero. Investments in I D i, they explained, have allowed a drastic drop in the price of desalinated water, which now stands at around 60 cents per cubic meter. “We have an unlimited resource which is sea water. Desalination allows us to have safe water regardless of the climate,” said the vice president of AEDyR. “It is a guarantee,” added Blázquez, after remembering that Acciona is one of the largest desalination companies in the world. It is now building a plant with a capacity of 900,000 cubic meters per day in Casablanca.
Catalonia has two desalination plants that provide 80 cubic hectometers of drinking water per year, which is equivalent to the water consumed by the entire metropolitan region of Barcelona in four months. One is in Blanes, operational since 2002, and the other in El Prat. This infrastructure, the second largest in Europe with a capacity to produce up to 60 cubic hectometers of water per year and in service since 2009, is now working at full capacity. Catalonia also has eight wastewater treatment plants and 550 treatment plants.
Purification, regeneration and reuse are also part of the equation against drought. In Europe, 4,000 million cubic meters of treated water are dumped into the sea every year. “Only 2% is reused,” warned the general director of SETA. In Spain the percentage rises to almost 10%, with the prospect of reaching 20%. “The technology exists, the money has to be found and it seems that the only thing that works is obligation,” said García Panadero in reference to the European directive on wastewater treatment plants. In this sense, Blázquez reported that this directive will force water pollution to be eliminated, subjected to desalination or desalination in order to be reused. He also establishes that all treatment plants with more than 10,000 inhabitants will not be able to draw energy from the electrical grid, but will have to be self-sufficient, by the middle of the next decade. Another directive prevents pouring anything into the public waterway if quality and quantity are not controlled, recalled the Acciona representative. “We have many European directives, for contracting, management of bodies of water, bathing areas, flooding, but there is no drought directive. “Isn’t Europe worried?” asked the director of the ACA.
Digitalization is a great ally to undertake this enormous task, also that of optimizing networks and avoiding leaks, which can reach 30%. “Does it make sense to build many desalination plants or wells, to do regeneration when water is lost in the networks, when we are not efficient? Would we be at home with the heating on and the window open?” Reyes warned. Digitalization, Blázquez and García Panadero assured, will make it possible to overcome problems and move from corrective maintenance to predictive maintenance. Thanks to the data, Reyes added, we will know exactly what the water is used for and that will allow us to gain efficiency and make policies adjusted to reality.
Blázquez put on the table the need to commit to public-private collaboration. “We have been trying for 20 years. Companies are eager to do things, but there are many impediments, everything goes very slowly and in the end, sometimes, it is not even done,” he lamented, stating that it takes more time to overcome the administrative procedures than to do the work itself. “A company that bets its money cannot wait five years to have the project running,” he added. In this sense, he advocated going beyond public contracts and moving towards competitions of ideas not only on the installation, but also on the operation in the 25 years ahead. “In the world we work like this,” said Blázquez. It would be, he explained, a concession model like the one given for the construction and operation of highways and highways. The legislation on contracting does not help, Reyes justified, because everything is marked by price, “there can be no creativity.” But for companies like Acciona, Blázquez responded, “what is interesting is the opposite, that it is not the price that matters but the technology and longer contracts.”
The Acciona manager also demanded that the procedures be simplified in order to accelerate the works in times of drought. Reyes, at this point, stated that the works that the ACA is doing and will do in the coming months, “which have not been done in 15 years,” will be done through direct award to companies because this is allowed by article 120 of the contract law when there is an emergency situation.