Our 4 year Drought - with Antoni Ventura, MD, Aigües de Manresa, Catalonia, Spain

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe. My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Antoni Ventura, or Toni Ventura as he's known to his friends, the Managing director of Aigües de Manresa in Catalonia in Spain.
[00:00:23] Piers Clark: Toni, brilliant to have you join us today.
[00:00:26] Antoni Ventura: Good morning Piers, and thank you for your kind invitation.
[00:00:30] Piers Clark: The way we start this is always with a little bit of background on the individual. Now let's hear that journey of how you got to where you are today.
[00:00:39] Antoni Ventura: I must say that I have multidisciplinary background. I hold a degree on economics, another degree on law, and finally a degree on contemporary history.
[00:00:48] Antoni Ventura: I'm not a technician at all. However, my colleagues, mostly engineers, told me that although I wasn't an engineer, I appeared as an engineer because I could speak their language
[00:01:01] Piers Clark: Well, I suspect that law training and the depths of knowledge that you need for an accountancy one means that you are very structured in your thinking, which of course, engineers love that sort of thing.
[00:01:10] Piers Clark: Alright, so what did you do when you left university?
[00:01:12] Antoni Ventura: I started in a local company in Barcelona related to ship building, and then I moved to an international company in the food industry. And in 1989 I started in Aigües de Barcelona. This is the beginning of my relationship with the water world.
[00:01:30] Piers Clark: So it's been 35 years. Then you were in a water utility, but you didn't stay in a water utility.
[00:01:36] Antoni Ventura: Yeah, I started in a water utility and I moved to a lot of departments and companies related to water, sanitation and industrial solutions for water. In 2012, I moved to Bristol UK and in 2017 I came back to Barcelona and that was the moment when I left Aigües de Barcelona and I joined Aigües de Manresa because there was an opportunity to leave the company.
[00:02:03] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Now, could you describe yourself in three words, please?
[00:02:06] Antoni Ventura: Well, I think that I am a global minded person, and also I will say I am very patient and a little bit of naive as well.
[00:02:15] Piers Clark: That takes enormous strength of character to be able to recognize that 'cause most people wouldn't have chosen that as well. That's really interesting.
[00:02:22] Piers Clark: Alright, now let's talk about Aigües de Manresa. Where is it? How many people do you serve and what sort of things do you do?
[00:02:30] Antoni Ventura: Aigües de Manresa is a public owned water company. We manage the entire water cycle from catchment to water treatment, distribution, sewage and wastewater treatment.
[00:02:41] Antoni Ventura: Our shareholders are the municipalities that own the company. The main one is Manresa, of course. Manresa is a small city, about 80,000 people in the center of Catalonia. We also work for up to 17 more municipalities, small villages with the scattered population in the surroundings of Manresa. In total, we work for 150,000 people
[00:03:07] Piers Clark: With all of those municipalities, how many are on the board?
[00:03:11] Antoni Ventura: All of them are in the general assembly and in the board we have three of them. The three of them represent the other municipalities.
[00:03:20] Piers Clark: Alright. Well I asked you for three words to describe yourself. How about three words to describe the organization?
[00:03:26] Antoni Ventura: Aigües de Manresa is a middle-sized company on its way to digitalization. It's a very recognized company in our territory because we come from the middle age when a canal was built in the 14th century to bring the water to the city of Manresa. It is called  Sèquia de Manresa.
[00:03:47] Piers Clark: And you're still using that asset? Surely not.
[00:03:50] Antoni Ventura: We are still using that middle age canal. Yes.
[00:03:54] Piers Clark: Good Lord.
[00:03:55] Piers Clark: Toni, I do have a question. So the one thing everyone knows about Catalonia is that it's quite a feisty area. There's always international news stories about its independence. Does any of that play into your day-to-day life as the managing director of the water utility?
[00:04:13] Antoni Ventura: Well, I must say not that much.
[00:04:15] Antoni Ventura: Catalonia is a nation with its own language, Catalan. Yes, we have a very moved relationship with the Kingdom of Spain. From time to time, we remind Spain that we still exist and we have our own language. We are very proud about our language, our literature. I must say that Catalan is studied in many foreign universities, so we are very proud of it.
[00:04:38] Piers Clark: Well said. Thank you for that. Now the core topic we're gonna talk about today is the fact that you have been experiencing a very severe drought over the last few years. Now, thankfully it's come to an end.
[00:04:50] Piers Clark: The story I'd like to explore is how did it appear? How did you respond over that period and now that it's ended and has it really ended?
[00:04:59] Piers Clark: What's the learning you are taking going forward?
[00:05:03] Antoni Ventura: We faced a very severe drought episode in the last four years. It was the most severe drought we have recorded. Our water reserves dropped to 14%, so it was very critical and then started raining, and now we are at 75% of water reserves.
[00:05:21] Antoni Ventura: The learning is that this is not casual. This is the new normal. This is a structural phenomenon as a consequence of the global climate change.
[00:05:31] Piers Clark: By that, you mean, okay, you are back at 75% reservoir levels, but maybe this is the start of another seven year drought.
[00:05:38] Antoni Ventura: Exactly. If we have a dry autumn and a dry spring next year, maybe we will start to have water scarcity again.
[00:05:45] Antoni Ventura: So this is the learning that this is not a singular episode.
[00:05:50] Piers Clark: Okay, so let's now go back four years to when the drought started. How far did you get into it before you recognized that we were now in a drought? And what sort of actions did you take to conserve your water resources and manage the drought?
[00:06:04] Antoni Ventura: The Water Authority in Catalonia is  Agència Catalana de l’Aigua.. The Water Authority has a permanent surveillance of the water reserves. In the second year, we realized that we could face a drought, so they started a drought plan to control consumptions. So we were told to contact with our main customers, mainly industrial customers, and also from the agricultural sector to start monitoring their consumptions.
[00:06:36] Antoni Ventura: Advising them to save water, recycle water, reuse water. This was, of course, a very difficult issue because people are very concerned, so it was a difficult conversation with our customers. Hopefully our domestic customers, they reacted very well. They started saving water, so our water consumption dropped 5% every year in two, three years.
[00:07:02] Piers Clark: It'd be really interesting to see that now that you've had some rain, whether that reduction in water usage continues or whether people go back to their old consumption.
[00:07:12] Antoni Ventura: Now there's an increase of the water consumption, but it won't be as it was four years ago. In the last 30 years, we have been reducing consumption per head every year.
[00:07:24] Antoni Ventura: Another thing is that we have been increasing our population, so that means that we need more water. Now we are about 107 liters per day per person.
[00:07:34] Piers Clark: That's brilliant. And do you know what your non-revenue water figure is?
[00:07:40] Antoni Ventura: Our non-revenue water is 17%, meaning we have a performance efficiency of 83%.
[00:07:47] Piers Clark: And do you have any feel for how much of that is leaks versus theft?
[00:07:53] Antoni Ventura: Maybe 10% can be leaks. Which is, I must say, is not too much given the distribution of our population because we have 1,400 kilometers of network for 150,000 people. This is difficult.
[00:08:10] Piers Clark: That's an interesting stat that you don't often hear, actually, the amount of network per head of population. I might start generating some data on that 'cause that will be a terrific figure to have.
[00:08:20] Antoni Ventura: Of course it is very different in Manresa. It's a compact city, but we have villages with a scattered population with isolated houses. We have some villages where we have 500 meters of network per person.
[00:08:36] Piers Clark: The flip side is, of course that is a long pipe for one individual, but that does mean that if you find the leak, it's relatively easy to fix because it's probably somewhere in the middle of a field. Whereas if it's in the middle of Manresa, you've gotta dig up a road. You've got much more complicated actions to do.
[00:08:51] Piers Clark: Alright, going back, your water reserves went down to 14% at that stage. What was the plan if it didn't rain?
[00:08:58] Antoni Ventura: The plan was first talk with our customers to make them reduce consumption. We didn't get the water supply at all. But we advise them to save water with some customers. We just ask them to monitor water consumption because in the end, for our industry, sometimes water consumption is just a bill that comes to the finance department. It's paid and nobody cares.
[00:09:22] Antoni Ventura: When we ask them to monitor and look at their water consumption every day, they realized an opportunity and started suggesting reusing and recycling water.
[00:09:32] Piers Clark: The moment the finance people suddenly see that there's an ability to improve their profit margins, then of course the motivations suddenly change. It's a really interesting thing that as a water company, your job is to sell water and wastewater services, and actually here you are encouraging your customers to use less of your product.
[00:09:54] Antoni Ventura: Exactly. We are the only industry that advises their customers not to use our product. We say that our goal is not to sell water. Our goal is to provide the service.
[00:10:04] Antoni Ventura: Of course, our costs are 80% fixed costs and just 20% are variable costs. So what we have to do is to make it possible that people get water from their top. And to do that, we need to invest to maintain our network and our facilities.
[00:10:21] Piers Clark: We are recording this in early August, 2025 and it's brilliant that you are at 75% levels in your reservoirs, but it must be higher than would be normal at this time of year. What's the plan if this is now the start of another four or five years?
[00:10:39] Antoni Ventura: We know it is not possible to have more water reservoirs. The plan, in this case for the water authorities, we have started a strategy on desalination. We are going to increase our desalination plants on the coast. Another is promoting the reuse of water like in industrial zero liquid discharge.
[00:10:58] Antoni Ventura: We are also doing regional government subsidized water network renovation in order to prevent leaks because one of our problems is that we have a very old infrastructure.
[00:11:08] Antoni Ventura: Our network is from the sixties and the seventies from the last century. So we need to renew our networks, and we have started a very strong leak detection campaign in order to find leaks in our network.
[00:11:20] Piers Clark: And that's not gonna be cheap. Of course, it gets very expensive. Moving that 10% to 9% to 8%. Every extra percent is just so much.
[00:11:28] Antoni Ventura: Yes, and maybe next year we are starting this problem again. And so we need to be ready with a combined solution to offer more water and lessen consumption.
[00:11:38] Piers Clark: Toni, I wish you the very best. We have unfortunately run out of time, so I'm gonna ask my last question. If you could go back to 1989, because you've been in the industry 35 years, what advice would you give a young Toni Ventura?
[00:11:55] Antoni Ventura: I would tell him to travel around the world to know other water companies and how do they face water security and the water issues. For example, I would like to go to the UK and Singapore. I think that they're doing very well, so I would recommend him to travel and to learn from other countries.
[00:12:15] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Toni Ventura, the Managing director of Aigües de Manresa in Catalonia in Spain.
[00:12:28] Piers Clark: I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you can join us next time. Thank you.