Barcelona bets on water desalination in response to ‘drought of the century’

The Catalonia region has decided to invest almost €500 million from EU funds to make its capital city more resilient to droughts, with two new desalination plants expected to come online by the end of the decade. But for the more than 500 Catalan towns that aren’t connected to the water grid, there is little prospect of improvement.

The Barcelona region is experiencing its worst drought in a century and the government has recently declared a state of emergency, imposing a series of restrictions on public water consumption, ranging from a ban on filling pools to a reduction in water used for agriculture.

“Catalonia is suffering the worst drought in the last century, we have never faced such a long and intense drought since rainfall records began,” the head of the regional government of Catalonia, Pere Aragones, told a news conference in early February.

To prepare for future droughts, the Spanish central government last week promised almost €500 million from EU recovery funds to expand an existing desalination plant and build a new one. Plans also include building new infrastructure to ship water into Barcelona from nearby ports in case of a prolonged emergency.

This adds to Catalan government plans to rely more heavily on desalination for drinking water, allowing the region to withstand droughts of up to 40 months.

Wider region left high and dry

But this project is mostly directed at the Barcelona metropolitan area, home to 3.3 million people, and to nearby towns that are already connected to the regional water distribution system.

It won’t do much for the 500 towns and more in the wider region that aren’t connected to the grid and get their water from underground aquifers, experts say.

The Catalan government said in its “Next Generation EU” investment plan that boosting desalination and water regeneration will reduce the pressure on aquifers.

But any positive effect won’t be felt before 2028 and 2029 when the new desalination plants are expected to start running, according to Ecological Transition and Demography Minister Teresa Ribera.

The state of emergency covers about half of Catalonia’s territory including its coast, where almost all the population lives.

Water there is mostly used for urban and domestic use, followed by agriculture (36%) and industrial use (20%). In the other half of the region, which is currently not in emergency, 95% of available water is used for agriculture, reflecting a wider trend in the rest of Spain.

Plans to build new desalination infrastructure date back to 2008, when another drought ravaged the Catalonia region. However, the plans were shelved due to a lack of funding from the Catalan Water Agency, which amassed billions in debt around those years. As a result, no new investments were planned until 2017.

Catalan authorities admitted publicly that lack of funding contributed to the region’s lack of drought preparedness, but also sought to reassure Barcelona residents that they will never run out of tap water.

This may not be the case outside the metropolitan area though, where the water system is plagued by historic under-investment, ageing infrastructure and high consumption. With the historic drought hitting the region, those issues are now coming to the surface.

In Cabrera d’Anoia

In Cabrera d’Anoia, a village about an hour outside of Barcelona, residents woke up in May last year to a message from the municipality saying that their tap water would remain closed from 9 pm to 9 am. It was the start of an ordeal that lasts to this day, when most residents still only have water available for a mere 11 hours a day.

Cabrera is among more than 500 towns that rely on aquifers and wells for their water supply.

The extreme drought of the past three years, combined with the exploitation of Cabrera’s aquifer by the nearby paper industry have all but dried out its wells, says the town’s mayor, Joan Diaz Calvo. This, paired with consistent leaking from pipes that didn’t undergo the necessary maintenance over the years, has created a perfect storm.

“Nobody would have thought that Cabrera could run out of water,” Calvo said, explaining that when the aquifer was full, the area was naturally rich in water.

According to the mayor, leaky pipes are currently responsible for the loss of more than half the water that is collected from the village’s wells. While the municipality is trying to solve the problem by connecting it to the regional grid, the process is lengthy and costly, Calvo said.

Asuncion Sansa, a 63-year-old resident, has recently resorted to installing a water tank in her garden after carrying on for almost nine months with jars that she would fill daily for the evening, when the taps are turned off.

“It’s a distressing situation. We are in a country that has a lot of means, we could have built a lot more infrastructure thinking that this situation could come. Did we need to get to this point to try and solve the issue?” she asked.

The municipality is currently receiving financial aid from the regional government to dig new wells and repair decrepit infrastructure, but it has still managed to accrue half a million euros in debt to provide residents with water cisterns at the height of the crisis – against a total municipal budget of €1.5 million.

The Catalan Water Agency recently said that it allocated €10 million for the construction and repair of wells, and that 200 municipalities already came forward to claim the funds. That would leave €50,000 for each municipality.

According to the mayor of Cabrera d’Anoia, building a well in his town would cost €198,000. “I don’t know what other well you can build with €50,000 – certainly not ours,” he said.

To Annelies Broekman, a researcher at the Barcelona research center CREAF, which focuses on climate change and biodiversity, there isn’t any certainty that Barcelona’s desalination and water regeneration initiative will actually take the pressure off water resources across the rest of the region.

As for the hope to solve issues in rural areas by connecting to the grid, that is not a panacea either, if anything because it will raise the price of water to compensate for installation costs, Broekman said.

Most importantly, the idea of buying one’s way out of the crisis by investing in desalination bypasses a more fundamental question around the over-exploitation of water resources, said the academic.

Spain ranks high in the European Environment Agency’s Water Exploitation Index, which measures water consumption as a percentage of renewable freshwater resources available in a place and time. Overconsumption is what more than anything would need urgent attention, according to Broekman:

“We are drinking water we don’t have.”

Cover photo: People visit the Sau reservoir near Barcelona, 04 February 2024. The ruins of the former town of Sant Roma de Sau, flooded several years ago when this dam was created, can be seen now because the lack of water. [Photo credit: EPA-EFE/SIU WU]