Brackish Desalination: An Affordable Alternative for Texas
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s an arid state with a rapidly growing population, Texas is in need of alternative water supplies. Since 1988, Bill Norris has been part of the solution. First with his company NRS and now with his current company, NorrisLeal, Mr. Norris has been a pioneer in promoting brackish desalination as a cost-effective alternative water source for Texas’s municipal suppliers. Today, NorrisLeal is a leader in desalination in Texas. In this interview with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill, Mr. Norris discusses how he got into the desalination field 30 years ago and the advances that have brought NorrisLeal to where it is today. Joshua Dill: Would you tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position?
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Joshua Dill: Please tell us about NorrisLeal today. Bill Norris: We’re not a large company, with about 25 people, but we’ve done some large projects. I have two other partners, JesÚs Leal and David Pettry. We’ve grown into more than a design engineering company. We actually do design, construction, and operations. We have three offices: one in Austin, one in Harlingen, and a project office in El Paso where we constructed and now operate a concentrate-reuse facility. We are also working on a brackish desalination plants in Cinco Ranch, which is in the Houston area, and in Alice, Texas. We’ve grown and made a name for ourselves in desalination, and we’ve strived to make desalination affordable. We got into construction and operations because we can produce a project more cost effectively than is possible with the conventional design-bid-build method. We prefer to do design-build; it allows us to be in control of the project and costs as well.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF NORRISLEAL.
Bill Norris: I graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in civil engineering; my first job was with the City of Dallas’s water utilities in 1977; I worked there for about 6 years. In 1981, I got my professional license. In 1983, I took a job with an East Texas consulting firm called Kindle, Stone, and Associates. I moved from Dallas to Longview, and a year later moved to Harlingen, Texas, to run the office the firm was opening in South Texas along the border. From that point, I became a minor partner with the company. In 1988, two of the partners, Rice and Stone, and I bought Kindle, Stone’s Arlington and Texarkana offices and called it NRS, or Norris, Rice, and Stone. We did our first desalination project in 1988. That project involved desalinating 2 million gallons of wastewater effluent a day and delivering it to Fruit of the Loom, which was bringing 3,000 jobs to South Texas. We provided water to its bleaching and dyeing operation; the plant then returned its wastewater back to us, and we treated and discharged it. It won the National League of Cities’ Award for Innovation and put us on the map for desalination. We’ve completed several desalination projects in South Texas. The one we designed for the Southmost Regional Water Authority in Brownsville is the largest water-producing project in Texas, treating 10 million gallons a day. Even though the desalination
plants in El Paso and San Antonio are larger in size, Southmost treats more water on an annual basis, so I consider it the highest-producing brackish desalination plant in Texas. In 2008, NRS was acquired by Abengoa, a Spanish company. After 4 years, Abengoa gave the company back. We had basically the same Bill Norris. leadership as we did when we were purchased, but we had to change the name to NorrisLeal. We couldn’t use the name NRS because Abengoa had basically dissolved it, having purchased the name, and it wasnt interested in doing what we were doing. For the last 6 years, we’ve been NorrisLeal. One of my current partners, JesÚs Leal, was also one of my partners at the end of my time at NRS.
