A hundred million gallons of ocean water will be pumped through the Carlsbad Desalination Project each day.
Credit: Gregory Bull/File/AP

The waves of the Pacific seem to taunt the thirsty landscape of California. The state has eight hundred and forty miles of coastline adjoining the world’s largest ocean—an oversupply of brine at a time when drought has left fallow more than half a million acres of farmland, claimed some twenty thousand jobs, and cost the economy billions of dollars. To Mark Lambert, though, the state’s water-rich coast is the overwhelming answer to its problems.

“Thirty-five thousand gallons a minute!” Lambert shouted recently, over the sound of water gushing from a fat pipe into a lagoon at the edge of the Pacific. He was showing me the discharge site of a billion-dollar desalination plant now under construction in Carlsbad, California. “Desal,” as it’s known in industry vernacular, converts ocean water […]