From Dams to Desal to Food Bowls: What Coast-to-Coast Australia Teaches Us About Water Security
Executive Exchange — Episode feature with Dr. Steve Capewell, Managing Director, Goulburn Valley Water
In this episode of the Exec Exchange, Dr. Piers Clark talks with Dr. Steve Capewell, Managing Director at Goulburn Valley Water (GVW) in Victoria, Australia. It’s a story that runs from the west coast to the east coast, from empty dams to fertile valleys — and it lands on a message the global water sector can’t afford to ignore:
Climate change won’t hit every region the same way. If your risk models assume it will, you’ve already got a problem.
Steve’s career has given him a front-row seat to two very different versions of water insecurity — and two very different strategic responses.
Chapter 1: When the Rain Just… Stops
Steve started his water career at Water Corporation in Western Australia in 2002, after working in an alumina refinery and becoming fascinated with water circuits in industrial processes.
Water Corporation is no small outfit: a single utility serving the entire state of Western Australia, covering some 2.5 million km². In the early 2000s, Perth experienced what can only be described as a brutal wake-up call: the rainfall-runoff into the city’s dams effectively collapsed.
The old planning logic — “it rains in winter, we store it, and we’re fine through summer” — simply stopped working.
That forced one of the boldest shifts in urban water history:
- The decision to fast-track large-scale seawater desalination as a climate-independent source.
- At the time, this meant building what was then the largest seawater desalination plant in the Southern Hemisphere.
Steve was deeply involved — initially on the technical side, then as a member and eventually chair of the alliance board overseeing the plant’s performance in partnership with Suez.
The result? Perth avoided becoming a “brown city” and instead became a global reference point for manufactured water as a core part of water security, not just an emergency backup.
And then they did it again.
- A second, even larger 100 GL/year seawater desalination plant was built further down the coast with a Spanish consortium.
- Together, the plants created a 150 GL/year climate-independent backbone for Perth’s supply.
- A third large desal plant is now underway for the northern suburbs.
Desalination wasn’t the only lever. Water Corporation also:
- Ran an early trial of indirect potable reuse (IPR) – purified recycled water for aquifer recharge.
- Negotiated performance criteria with the health regulator before formal guidelines existed.
- Commissioned a 14 GL/year purified recycled water plant, later expanded to 28 GL/year — still the only operational-scale PRW scheme of its kind in Australia.
The lesson from the west coast is clear: when quantity collapses, you need manufactured water and a balanced portfolio of sources. You don’t get to debate it forever.
Chapter 2: When Your Problem Isn’t Quantity, It’s Quality
Fast forward to late 2020. In the middle of a pandemic, Steve moves 2,800 km across the country to take up the role of Managing Director at Goulburn Valley Water in regional Victoria.
Structurally, it’s a different world:
- GVW is one of 18 water corporations in the state, rather than a single statewide utility.
- It covers 25,000 km², serves 54 towns and a population of around 135,000 people.
- And it sits in the heart of Victoria’s “food bowl”:
- Around 50% of the state’s fruit is produced in the region.
- Roughly a quarter of all milk produced in Australia comes from there.
- The regional economy is valued at around AU$3.5 billion per year.
In other words, GVW isn’t just keeping taps running. It’s a critical enabler of a globally relevant food supply chain.
Unlike Perth, Goulburn Valley’s raw water sources are, for now, relatively plentiful and secure. The region is tied into the enormous Murray–Darling system, and its key river networks look reasonably resilient in terms of volume.
But that doesn’t mean the region is safe.
Steve’s assessment is blunt:
In Goulburn Valley, water security risk is far more likely to arrive via deteriorating water quality, not a loss of quantity.
Drivers include:
- Changing land use
- Urbanisation and associated stormwater
- Broader land management practices across the catchment
And, crucially, these are outside the direct control of the utility. GVW doesn’t dictate land use; it has to live with the consequences.
As any process engineer knows, you can theoretically treat almost anything. But in practice:
- More contaminants mean more treatment barriers
- More barriers mean higher operational complexity and cost
- For a utility that must operate 24/7 with high reliability — especially in a region that underpins food exports — there is a hard limit to how far you can push “just add another barrier” before it becomes unsustainable.
Building a Different Kind of Portfolio
So what do you do when your risk is quality degradation rather than hydrological failure?
GVW is now:
- Assessing scheme resilience one by one, understanding where vulnerabilities lie.
- Augmenting existing systems where necessary to buy resilience.
- Expanding non-potable recycling to take pressure off potable sources in some towns.
- Actively studying where advanced treatment and even desalination for drinking water could become part of the long-term mix — even in an inland, apparently well-supplied region.
The logic is the same as in Perth, but the trigger is different:
- In Perth, the drivers were hard and visible: dams stopped yielding, and the city faced a very real risk of running out of water.
- In Goulburn Valley, the threat is more gradual and insidious: a slow drift in source water quality that could silently push treatment into the realm of the technically possible but economically insane.
For water leaders elsewhere, the question practically writes itself:
Are you planning only for volume risk, or are you genuinely stress-testing your system against long-term quality riskas land use and climate evolve?
People, Not Just Plants
You’d expect a metallurgical and chemical engineer with a PhD and a track record in big desal projects to finish with a hymn to infrastructure.
He doesn’t.
Asked what advice he’d give a younger version of himself, Steve doesn’t talk about membranes, alliances or portfolio theory. He talks about people.
Looking back at those landmark projects in Perth, it would have been easy to get lost in:
- Technology choices
- Asset performance
- Commercial structures
But what actually delivered water security were:
- Talented teams, assembled across organisations
- Strong partnerships with the private sector
- Effective communication with regulators and communities
His view is that:
- We won’t “build” our way out of climate change with assets alone.
- We’ll need to design and operate complex systems with capability, culture and collaboration at the centre.
- If you want water security in 20 years, you need to be growing and nurturing your people now.
What This Means for Water Leaders
Taken together, Steve’s coast-to-coast experience leaves the sector with some uncomfortable but necessary questions:
- Are your planning models still assuming the past hydrology is a decent guide to the future?
- Do you have a balanced portfolio of sources — including manufactured water — or are you gambling on dams and luck?
- Are you treating water quality risk with the same seriousness as quantity risk?
- And are you investing as much thought into people and partnerships as you are into concrete and control systems?
If the answer to any of those is “not really”, you know where to start.
To hear the full conversation with Dr. Steve Capewell and explore these themes in more depth, listen to this episode of the Exec Exchange.