Desalinating Seawater at Rosarito Beaches, a Strategic Project in the Face of Dependence on the Colorado River and Baja California’s Water Scarcity

Abstract

Given the water scarcity in Baja California’s coastal cities, state and federal authorities opted to build a seawater desalinization plant in Rosarito, with the possibility of exporting part of the production to San Diego. The project was approved in 2017 amidst controversy and has been halted due to the lack of consensus about the licensing terms to a private company. The aim of this article is to show the project’s regional and binational importance, underlining the technocratic way it was conceived and handled, based on an analysis of the authorization process and a review of the literature covering the global trend toward desalinization given water scarcity. The author concludes that the project has been underway and planned for a long time and has sparked great interest in both Mexico and the United States, which strengthens the probability of its coming to fruition in the absence of other proposals on the Mexican side of the border.