Brisbane desal. water costs three times Perth equivalent ...

Financial 'fiddling while Rome burns'.

By delaying the Tugun desalination plant, cost increases will blow out the cost of the desalination plant to three times the cost of the Perth desalination plant at Kwinana.

Excerpt from the Courier Mail:

Our desal 'triples' WA price

5 May 2007

Western Australia paid only $367 million for a desalination plant producing the same amount of water as Queensland's $1.12 billion Tugun facility.

And Queensland could have struck a similar deal if it had started the project earlier, desalination engineer Gary Crisp of the Water Corporation of Western Australia said yesterday.

Most of the tripling of cost was due to Queensland waiting too long to start the project, he said.

Mr Crisp said Perth residents would pay $1.16 per kilolitre for their desalinated water – while southeast Queensland residents face $2.40 to $2.60 per kilolitre.
...

"We got in nice and early. Now there are many huge plants being built around the world and there is a high demand for workers," Mr Crisp said. "Seventy per cent of the cost of the plant is materials and labour."
...


So, if delays have lead to a tripling of costs for the Tugun desalination plant, is it really believable that the cost of Mayor Thorley's ill-fated Water Futures project would be stuck at $68 million or even increased to only $110 million?

Why would the cost of one plant using membrane filter technology increase 300 percent and yet a recycled water plant using similar technology either doesn't increase in price over the past 2+ years or increases only by 61% to $110 million.

If you look at the real-life examples of the cost of the SEQ AWT plants or the Kwinana/Tugun cost comparison, it is clear that Mr Flanagan's costings for Water Futures are just more hot air.

Perhaps he could stop contributing to global warming ...