BEF works to identify a unique category of Water Projects that can meet critical corporate objectives for volumetric water stewardship in Southern California. Companies seek collective impact, cost-effective volumetric benefits, turn-key outcomes with near-term implementation, long-term benefits, and catalytic water stewardship impact with material connection to SOCAL operations. Because much of the region’s water is imported, companies struggle to identify high volume, high impact, hyper-local projects. This project is uniquely positioned to meet corporate goals and demonstrate collective water stewardship impact for a diverse suite of companies.

The project partners with the Water Replenishment District of Southern California (CA’s largest groundwater agency) to acquire and reclaim brackish groundwater to increase water supply for the Los Angeles metro area. The project:

• Creates infrastructure to deliver brackish groundwater to an underutilized desalting facility that currently has 5MGD capacity but at present can only operate at 3MGD
• With access to the brackish water and new delivery infrastructure, the project can treat an additional 2MGD to increase SOCAL water supply.
• Treated water will be used by a local city and will improve water supply resilience for the region by increasing local supply and reducing the need to rely on imported water
• The project also assists in basin and groundwater remediation by extracting brackish water and creating additional freshwater storage space to further increase SOCAL’s ability to rely on local water sources while mitigating saltwater intrusion.
• We project a cost-effective project with 730M gallons/year volume benefit