North City Pure Water Facility, University City, San Diego

San Diego imports most of its water. The plant on Eastgate Mall is the city’s answer to that.

North City Pure Water Facility will produce up to 30 million gallons a day of purified water from recycled flow supplied by the adjacent North City Water Reclamation Plant. It anchors Pure Water Phase 1, the capital program meant to supply about a third of the city’s drinking water from local sources by 2035 and cut the city’s exposure to Colorado River and State Water Project deliveries.

Shimmick holds the $356 million design-build contract for the facility and its pump station.

Project Scope

The purification train runs five steps: ozonation, biological activated carbon filtration, membrane filtration, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet light with advanced oxidation. That ozone-BAC-MF-RO-UV/AOP sequence is becoming the reference process for advanced purification in California, and the site has history behind the choice. A 1-mgd demonstration plant ran here from June 2011 and proved out the train before full-scale design began.

A companion pump station moves finished water to Miramar Reservoir, where it’s blended and then re-treated at the Miramar Drinking Water Plant before it enters distribution. That’s reservoir augmentation rather than direct potable reuse, and the environmental buffer is what California’s regulatory framework was built around.

The facility is one of twelve distinct Phase 1 capital projects. The others include the Morena Pump Station, the Morena pipelines and tunnels, an expansion of the North City Water Reclamation Plant, and improvements at the Metropolitan Biosolids Center. Phase 1 construction touches Morena, Bay Park, Bay Ho, Clairemont, University City, Miramar and Scripps Ranch.

Parsons runs construction management across the program, and Brown and Caldwell with MWH provide program management. EPA closed a $614 million WIFIA loan with the City for Phase 1 in 2018 and later extended an additional $74 million WIFIA loan invitation. The system behind all of it serves roughly 1.43 million people.

Why It Matters

Potable reuse is where large western utilities are putting their capital, and North City is the largest U.S. reservoir-augmentation project of its generation. Cities carrying the same imported-supply risk are copying the template rather than inventing one.

The delivery structure deserves as much attention as the process train. A design-build treatment plant sits inside a twelve-project, multi-billion-dollar program with separate program management and construction management layers, which is how a municipal utility with a lean capital staff executes something this size without absorbing the integration risk itself.

There’s also a regulatory calculation underneath the economics. Diverting flow away from the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant’s ocean outfall reduces the pressure for an expensive secondary-treatment upgrade there, and that avoided cost is part of what makes Pure Water pencil. Water agencies across the Southwest are running the same arithmetic on their own outfalls.

Project Team & Details