The California Coastal Commission was due to rule on 12 May whether or not to grant a coastal development permit to the long-planned 189,250m~3/d desalination plant at Huntington Beach.Atthe end of April, the Commission's staff recommended rejecting the permit application, 25 years after the project was first proposed by private developer Poseidon. The project featured in GWI's first desalination tracker published in November 2003, with the entry stating that the plant was expected to be online by 2007 at a total cost of $240 million, and had an expected water price of $0.65/m~3. Poseidon has since spent close to $100 million trying to push the project through the permitting system, and all the additional costs inflicted on the plant by the permitting process are likely to have more than tripled the bill. This month's chart puts the project in the context of other long-delayed desalination projects. It shows that the United States, together with the Gaza Strip, are the worst markets in the world for project delays. Jordan's Aqaba project could potentially qualify as the longest delayed project, however - the idea of a large-scale desal plant in Aqaba serving Amman and sending the brine to replenish the Dead Sea was first mooted in the 1970s, but the current proposal no longer involves the Dead Sea.
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