Field Work Reflection: Closer to a dissertation topic

Researching for Locals and Academics

My goal this summer was to find a research question that contributed to two distinct conversations. On the on hand, I want to address local problems in the Llobregat basin. Simultaneously, I want my research to advance the literature on river restoration or management. Finding a question that speaks both to local users and the larger academic community has not been easy. Many local questions could be answered by environmental consultants without creating new knowledge. As such, they are not appropriate for PhD research. On the other hand, I would be uncomfortable answering a question devoid of local salience.

This summer I conducted preliminary field work that introduced me to the Llobregat River, its managers, history, and competing uses. From mid June to mid August, I interviewed experts and gathered documentation in Barcelona. In order to see the current river conditions first hand, I hiked the length of the river from the Pyrenees Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea. Over the course of ten days and 170 kilometers, I met local users and neighbors who shared their knowledge of the river, its past, present and potential future.

Framing the Research in the Llobregat Watershed

The Llobregat River is highly polluted and heavily managed. Still, millions depend on surface water from the Llobregat for industrial, agricultural and domestic uses. Treating the highly polluted river for drinking water purposes exposes Barcelona residents to several public health risks that few are willing to discuss openly. Water managers at the two treatment facilities have been dealing with industrial contaminants and mining residue dumped into the Llobregat for decades. Potash mines have been contaminating the Llobregat with salts since the 1930s, and industrial waste has been dumped in the river since the 1960s. This has not stopped the region from relying on the Llobregat River to meet its basic water needs.

The private company Aigües de Barcelona (AGBAR) built the first water treatment plant on the shores of the Llobregat in the 1950’s. Since then they have mixed treated surface water with high quality groundwater from the Llobregat Delta aquifer. ABGAR built the water treatment facility in the lower segment of the river outside the city of Barcelona in the suburb of Sant Joan Despí. This site has proven unfortunate because it is located downstream of major industries at the bottom of the watershed. The surface water to ground water ratio at the AGBAR plant is usually around 50/50, and the average intake from the Llobregat is 3 cubic meters per second (m³/s). During the dry season, the AGBAR facility frequently diverts the entire Llobregat River into the treatment plant. However the river does not run dry because immediately after the diversion point, another pipe dumps industrial waste and treated wastewater into the riverbed.

In the 1970’s the Catalan Government built a second water treatment plant upstream in the town of Abrera. This plant is managed by the public water agency Aigües Ter-Llobregat (ATLL) who is responsible for treating water from the Llobregat and Ter Rivers and then re-selling it to municipal providers. While the extraction point in Abrera is upstream of many industries, they too have considerable problems maintaining water quality. On the day of my visit, the water was dark red prior to filtration. I was told that this was unusual, but later when I visited the ABGAR plant they asked me if the ATLL plant in Abrera continued to struggle with the red dyes.

Both facilities use classic water treatment technology with large sedimentation ponds and sand filters. They avoid disinfecting with chlorine as much as possible because it reacts with organic matter to produce carcinogenic trihalomethanes. Instead, they disinfect with with ozone (O₃) and chlorine dioxide. Within the last decade, both treatment plants have installed activated carbon filters. The carbon filters are expensive, and the maintenance consists of shipping them to large ovens in Italy where they burn off filtered material. After every burning, the damaged carbon must be replaced with new material. These maintenance expenses may be a critical component of a dissertation that tries to relate treatment costs with water quality.

While the activated carbon filters brought considerable improvements in drinking water quality, the taste has remained poor. Both water treatment plants are now investing in advanced membrane technology that will remove additional contaminants, especially various salts compounds. The Llobregat River becomes extraordinarily salty after it passes the potash mines in the towns of Sallent and Cardona. The salts in the Llobregat have plagued drinking water managers for decades and have been responsible for a consistently poor taste in Barcelona’s tap water. In the 1980’s, the Catalan government tried to mitigate salt contamination by diverting salt runoff from the mines into a long pipe that ran 100 kilometers from mines to the Mediterranean. This pipe collects the salty stormwater runoff and to some degree, has reduced the river’s salinity. However maintaining the pipe has been difficult and periodic breaks have released heavy salt loads onto fields destroying crops or into the river disrupting aquatic ecosystems.

When I visited the water treatment plants, both were undergoing major construction to install the modern desalination technology. It was odd to see desalination systems being installed in a freshwater ecosystem and I wondered if there was any precedent for this absurdity. Both of these systems are costing millions of Euros. The public agency ATLL is purchasing electrodialysis desalination equipment manufactured by General Electric, while downstream, the private firm AGBAR is investing in reverse osmosis. Both systems are highly energy intensive and costly to maintain. Nevertheless, AGBAR is a profit driven firm that would not have invested in desalination had the project not been deemed financial viable. At the same time, I suspect that these projects have been partially subsidized by the European Union or other government agencies, thereby reducing the investment burden.

The investment in desalination shows that water managers in Catalonia are implementing an “end of pipe” solution to mitigate its environmental woes. Instead of addressing the contamination at its source, water managers have chosen to make a huge investment in a new technology that is costly to purchase and maintain. In this respect, they are moving in the opposite direction of water managers from New York City who have avoided expensive filtration by investing in watershed management upstream. The case of New York City’s water supply is perhaps the most frequently cited example of intelligent water management because the protection of the Catskill watershed came at only a fraction of the cost of the planned filtration plant. The financial savings have been estimated at USD $6 to $8 billion, plus $300 million per year in maintenance (Chichilnisky & Heal 1998, National Research Council 2000). While these avoided costs have erroneously been referred to as the “value” of the ecosystem services, it is nevertheless a good example of a successful strategy that protects ecosystems and improves water management.

Initially I was discouraged to learn about the magnitude of the investment in desalination along the shores of the Llobregat. Had I began my dissertation five years ago, I probably could have made a strong case in favor of river restoration at its source, mirroring the experience from New York City, and potentially help redirect the millions invested in desalination into watershed management instead. So now that this investment is underway, are there no longer economic arguments in favor of river restoration? Is the concept of ecosystem services only useful for averting infrastructure investments? How can the notion of ecosystem services still be applied in the Llobregat watershed?

My interviews with river managers in Spain made it clear that they do not need a dissertation to inform them that the Llobregat River is polluted. Nor are they interested in a dissertation about river restoration methods – for the most part, they have the capacity to restore geomorphology and improve wastewater treatment. However river managers did express interest in studies that could strengthen linkages between restoration activities upstream and water users downstream. If river managers had more evidence that restoration investments in the upper parts of the watershed could produce tangible benefits for water users throughout the river’s course, this evidence could refocus attention away from the “end of pipe” approaches and encourage restoration efforts in the upper parts of the watershed.

The questions posed by water managers in Spain fit nicely into a broader discussion in the academic literature on ecosystem services.