Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme — Queensland's Drought-Built Reuse Network That Now Sits Mostly Idle (A Cautionary Case)

The Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme (WCRWS) in South East Queensland, Australia, was built in response to the 2000s Millennium Drought as regional dam levels fell to around 17% in 2007.

Three advanced water treatment plants (Bundamba, Gibson Island and Luggage Point) fed a network of more than 200 km of pipeline with design capacity of 232 ML/day, supplying primarily the Swanbank and Tarong/Tarong North power stations. A pipeline was also built to allow indirect potable reuse into Wivenhoe Dam if drought worsened, but this link was never operationally activated.

Between August 2007 and July 2010 the scheme supplied over 37,000 ML in total. Capital cost is most commonly cited at around AUD 2.5 billion, with the Australian Government contributing AUD 408 million.

Seqwater placed the scheme into 'care and maintenance' in 2013. An independent Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering report (2013) found the original indirect-potable-reuse design 'overly energy intensive... inefficient and economically unsustainable, particularly if used only for emergency or contingent circumstances', and recommended cheaper direct-potable-reuse alternatives instead. This is included as a documented cautionary case: substantial, independently audited infrastructure that delivered real drought-contingency volumes for several years, but whose core design was independently assessed as economically unsustainable and has sat largely idle, still accruing major fixed costs, for most of the past decade.