ACTIFLO® CARB: Advanced Organic Carbon Removal or Smoke & Mirrors?

I have been intrigued with Kruger Inc.’s (part of Veolia Water) ACTIFLO® CARB process ever since it was selected as pretreatment to ceramic membranes for a new water treatment plant at Parker Water & Sanitation District (PWSD) in Colorado. ACTIFLO® CARB was selected based on what I thought was very shaky science – a ‘trial’ on a high total organic carbon (TOC) water source that consisted of dosing 4000 mg/L of virgin powdered activated carbon in front of the membranes operated in crossflow mode and recirculated for eighty hours. The results showed TOC removal starting at 90% and finishing at about 50% after the eighty hours. Somehow Kruger was able to convince the consulting engineer and PWSD that these results could be extrapolated to predict the performance of a continuously operating full-scale plant with a 25 mg/L fresh PAC make-up dose.

The ACTIFLO® CARB process is an extension of Kruger’s ACTIFLO® process where powdered activated carbon (PAC) is added in a contact stage at the front of the process followed by coagulant addition and then microsand and polymer to provide ballasted flocculation/clarifiation (see Figure 1). Most of the PAC is recirculated while a portion is wasted, which allows more of the carbon adsorption sites to be utilized. Make-up PAC doses range from 15 to 40 mg/L. The addition of the “CARB” step to ACTIFLO® provides greater TOC removal when the coagulants used in the ACTIFLO® process cannot achieve treated water quality goals.

Figure 1: Schematic of the ACTIFLO® CARB Process

What was astounding to me was that the engineer and District accepted the manufacturer’s recommendation after such a short trial of a process that has no operating installations in the US, where the pilot plant did not even simulate how the full scale system would operate and where more proven treatment alternatives, such as ion exchange, tested over longer periods reliably demonstrated equivalent levels of TOC removal…. Such is the influencing power of a large established technology provider!

Finally a Fair Evaluation

In the past few months, more than two years after the PWSD trial, I finally had the opportunity to see the performance of ACTIFLO® CARB in a trial in Georgia operated for at least several weeks on a pilot plant representative of the full-scale process. The objective of the project was to improve TOC removal of the existing water treatment plant to meet tightening EPA standards for disinfection byproducts. As with the PWSD trial, ion exchange pre-treatment was evaluated in parallel but this time it was a fair side-by-side comparison over similar operating periods.

Lo and behold….under steady-state operating conditions the ACTIFLO® CARB process only achieved 52% TOC removal at very high PAC make-up doses and about 40% removal at economically realistic make-up doses. This compared to 66% TOC removal for the ion exchange pretreatment process. As the trial has only recently been completed, specific results will likely be publicly available in early 2011.

In this Georgia project the power and influence of the manufacturer could not overshadow the results of a well thought out and executed trial. While ACTIFLO® CARB has been shown to remove more TOC than coagulation alone, I can't see how the marginal improvement in removal justifies the considerable extra expense.

NOM Fouling of Low-Pressure Membranes: Demystifying the Research

A Decision Tree Analysis helps unveil the guilty fraction of NOM.

In my previous post I wrote about my Holy Grail like quest to find what fraction of natural organic matter (NOM) was responsible for low-pressure membrane fouling. After reading numerous research papers, each looking at the membrane fouling potential of only one or two of the many NOM characteristics at once, I was starting to think that perhaps the Holy Grail would be easier to find.

I therefore decided to pull together as many of the findings as possible in a decision tree analysis to see if I could piece together a consistent trend. If so, this decision tree could be used as a guide to determine pretreatment requirements for low-pressure membranes. Gaps on the decision tree could help direct where further research is required.

In developing the decision tree, I focused on the research reported in what I think are four very good papers that collectively evaluate the impacts of a wide range of NOM and membrane characteristics. The result? I was pleasantly surprised to find a consistent trend in the conclusions as can be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Decision Tree for Identifying Low-Pressure Membrane Foulants

The Conclusions

From the decision tree, it is fairly clear that the NOM responsible for fouling low-pressure membranes comes from the high molecular weight fraction. Within this fraction, it is specifically the hydrophilic material consisting of carbohydrates (polysaccharides and proteins) and colloids that cause the membrane fouling. While the four research projects did not all look at the same set of NOM characteristics (Howe just looked at size, Yamamura looked at functionality and charge, while Lee and Humbert looked at size and functionality) when plotted on the decision tree, it can be seen that the research findings for each parameter are consistent.

Howe’s assumption that the NOM foulants removed by coagulation are more hydrophobic and acidic conflicted with the other research results, but his findings that the large Molecular Weight (MWt) colloidal material is responsible for fouling is consistent with the other research. Howe and Lee also found that pore size is important where fouling of microfiltration (MF) membranes is more likely to occur via pore blockage, which is more difficult to reverse, compared to ultrafiltration (UF) fouling which occurs by gel layer formation (UF pores are an order of magnitude smaller than MF pores). Most of the research concluded that negatively charged humics are not a major membrane foulant, probably due to electrostatic repulsion with the membrane materials which are also negatively charged.

In addition to the impact of NOM fractions, Yamamura found that specific membrane materials can impact the degree of fouling where the greater electronegativity of PVDF membranes results in stronger hydrogen bonding of hydrophilic NOM compared to PE membranes which have a lower electronegativity.

Having pulled together this decision tree, at least for me, the mystery of what fraction of NOM is responsible for low-pressure membrane fouling is beginning to unravel. All I need now is for a well funded research team to conduct a study looking at all of the NOM and membrane characteristics together and the Holy Grail will be found – maybe….

References
1. Howe, K; Clark, M; “Effect of coagulation pretreatment on membrane performance”, Journal AWWA, April 2006.
2. Lee, N; Amy, G; Croue, J; Buisson, H; “Identification and understanding of fouling in low-pressure membrane (MF/UF) filtration by natural organic matter (NOM)”, Water Research 38 (2004), 4511-4523.
3. Humbert, H; Gallard, H; Jacquemet, V; Croue, J; “Combination of coagulation and ion exchange for the reduction of UF fouling properties of a high DOC content surface water”, Water Research 41(2007) 3803-3811.
4. Yamamura, H; Kimura, K; Okajima, T; Tokumoto, H; Watanabe, Y; “Affinity of Functional Groups for Membrane Surfaces: Implications for Physically Irreversible Fouling”, Environmental Science & Technology, Vol. 42, No. 14, 2008.

Organic Fouling of Membranes: Could the guilty NOM fraction please come forward!

It is a well known fact that natural organic matter (NOM) is one of the major contributors to low-pressure membrane fouling but can anyone really pinpoint what specific fraction of NOM is responsible? Based on the variety of research conclusions I have seen, it is likely there is no 'one-size-fits-all' answer.

I am surprised that low-pressure membrane giants such as Siemens/Memcor and GE/Zenon have not put more research effort into solving the organic fouling riddle so that they can better optimize the performance of their products. Perhaps they have and are keeping the solution to themselves for competitive advantage…
There are many ways that NOM can be characterized and typically the research has only looked at one or two of these characteristics simultaneously to identify what fraction of NOM is responsible for membrane fouling.

NOM Ain’t NOM…

NOM characteristics can vary significantly from water source to water source depending on the organic matter in the catchment, geological conditions, climate, etc. The most common variables used to characterize organic matter are size, structure and functionality.

These variables are further defined as follows:

Size: Size fractions can be defined as particulate (>0.45 µm), dissolved (<0.45 µm) and colloidal (~1 nm to 1 µm) where the colloidal fraction crosses over the dissolved and particulate definitions. Molecular weight (MW) distribution is also used to characterize NOM size fractions.

Structure: NOM fractions can also be described in terms of hydrophobic (aromatic) or hydrophilic (aliphatic) structure which indicates whether NOM is water repelling (hydrophobic) or water adsorbing (hydrophilic).

Functionality/Charge: NOM can also be characterized by functional group content (humic and fulvic acids) which impacts the NOM’s (negative) charge density.

To further complicate the characterization, hydrophobic through to hydrophilic NOM can be low to high molecular weight in size, although as a rule of thumb, hydrophobic NOM fractions generally have higher MW.

In addition to NOM characteristics, the low-pressure membrane properties themselves are also likely to play a role as to whether NOM will result in fouling or not. Variables such as membrane pore size, surface charge and surface roughness may impact whether NOM fouling occurs by pore blockage, adsorption or gel layer formation.

So What Causes the Fouling??

With all of this knowledge about NOM and membranes, we must to able to pinpoint which characteristics lead to membrane fouling, right? There have been many studies conducted, from laboratory to full-scale, to investigate the impacts on membrane performance of different NOM fractions. Here is a very brief summary of the findings of some of these:

Howe and Clark (2006) concluded that it is the dissolved and colloidal fraction of NOM in the 100 kDa to 1 µm size range that is responsible for most of the membrane fouling potential. This higher MW fraction of NOM is removed by coagulation and is assumed to be more hydrophobic and more acidic.

Yamamura et al. (2008) and Lee et al. (2004) identified that the hydrophilic fraction of NOM provides a larger contribution to membrane fouling than hydrophobic humic substances. Lee et al. also concluded that macromolecules of a hydrophilic character (e.g. polysaccharides) and/or colloidal organic matter in the hydrophilic NOM fraction may foul low-pressure membranes. It is interesting to note that for the technique used by Lee to isolate the polar fractions of NOM, organic colloids also end up in the hydrophilic fraction. This may be why some generalizations are made that hydrophilic NOM is responsible for membrane fouling when this isolation technique is used while the colloidal material may actually be responsible for the fouling.

Greater flux decline was seen by Lee et al. during microfiltration (MF) compared to ultrafiltration (UF) where MF fouling was caused by pore blockage by the larger macromolecules and organic colloids, while for UF (which has smaller pores), flux decline was caused by gel layer formation which is more easily reversed than pore blockage. Interestingly, hydrophobic/hydrophilic properties of the membranes were found to have minimal impact on membrane fouling.

The proof is in the pilot….

Why are there so many different conclusions as to what fractions of NOM are responsible for membrane fouling? Is it because membrane fouling is due to a combination of NOM and membrane characteristics that have not been looked at simultaneously or is there another characteristic that has not yet been identified?

My conclusion is that all of the critical variables have been identified, but nobody has yet (at least as far as I have found) looked at all of these in the one study. The work conducted by Lee et al. comes closest. Different fractions of NOM have different impacts on membranes with different properties. That sets up a pretty complex research matrix. If you are looking at membrane treatment for a particular water source, at least you just have one set of NOM variables to evaluate.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we are at the point where we can adequately fingerprint the NOM in a water source to be able to predict the fouling potential for a specific membrane type. This will only be determined by trial and error on a continuously operated pilot plant. You will be misguided to aim for a total NOM removal target as the treatment goal when choosing a pretreatment process without also looking at the fouling characteristics of the specific NOM in the membrane feed water.

References

1. Howe, K; Clark, M; “Effect of coagulation pretreatment on membrane performance”, Journal AWWA, April 2006.

2. Yamamura, H; Kimura, K; Okajima, T; Tokumoto, H; Watanabe, Y; “Affinity of Functional Groups for Membrane Surfaces: Implications for Physically Irreversible Fouling”, Environmental Science & Technology, Vol. 42, No. 14, 2008.

3. Lee, N; Amy, G; Croue, J; Buisson, H; “Identification and understanding of fouling in low-pressure membrane (MF/UF) filtration by natural organic matter (NOM)”, Water Research 38 (2004), 4511-4523.

Forward Osmosis: A great leap forward for water treatment or a false start?

Two years ago I got really excited about forward osmosis. I was at the Water Reuse Association’s Annual WateReuse Symposium in Dallas where I saw several presentations on the potential to use FO for high quality effluent reuse applications at significantly lower energy consumption than RO. At that time energy prices were through the roof, population growth was exploding in the arid U.S. West and I thought that this was just the technology we needed to resolve what has become known as the “energy-water nexus”!

And I wasn’t the only one jumping on the FO train. Over the next 12 months at least two start-up companies (Oasys Water Inc. and QuantumSphere Inc.) filed patents and claimed to have uncovered desalination applications for FO that would solve the water crises of the future and analysts covering the water sector were hailing FO as the next big thing.

Two years later, as far as I can tell, the hype over FO has died down. Why?

How it Works
In my excitement about the prospects for FO at the 2008 WRA Conference, I bought two Water Reuse Research Foundation reports to learn more. For those unfamiliar with FO, a simplified description as to how the technology works is as follows:

Forward osmosis is an osmotic process that uses a semi-permeable membrane to effect separation of water from dissolved solutes. The driving force for this separation is an osmotic pressure gradient, where a “draw” solution of high concentration is used to induce a net flow of water through the membrane from a solution of a lower concentration into the draw solution thus separating the feed solution from its solutes (Figure 1). In contrast, reverse osmosis (RO) uses hydraulic pressure as the driving force for separation, counteracting the osmotic pressure gradient that would otherwise favor water flux from the permeate to the feed.

Driven by an osmotic pressure gradient, FO does not require significant energy input other than low energy pumping of the process streams. Potential advantages of FO are high rejections of a wide range of contaminants at a lower membrane fouling potential than pressure driven membrane processes such as RO. All of this is achieved at significantly lower energy consumption than RO. So why wouldn’t you be excited about the potential for this technology??

Drinking Water Fool’s Gold?
To date, the only commercial drinking water application for FO has been developed by a company called Hydration Technology Innovations (HTI) who has developed a small water purification bag (hydration bag) used mostly by the military. The bag is made of a semi-permeable FO membrane and contains a solid glucose draw solution. When immersed in contaminated water from puddles, ponds or even urine in emergency situations, purified water diffuses into the bag, slowly diluting the solid draw solution to produce a sweet drink. A nice application but hardly economical on a large scale to put Powerade in the distribution system…..

One of the start-up companies, Oasys Water Inc., uses FO technology developed at Yale University and states that its technology can produce desalinated water at less than half the cost and using 90% less energy than RO. If that is the case, this technology should be taking off! But if seawater is the feed, what is the draw solution? A strong draw solution is formed using highly soluble ammonia and carbon dioxide gases which produces a strong enough osmotic pressure to extract water from seawater. The diluted draw solution is heated to about 60 deg C to decompose the ammonia and carbon dioxide and the pure product water is then recovered after degassing via column or membrane distillation.

Now I have no doubt that the Oasys technology works, but it sounds like a pretty complicated treatment train to me. I believe that for this process to be economically feasible it should be located near the ocean where there is a waste heat source, so preferably at a power plant with a seawater cooling system. A lot of ‘ifs and buts’, so to me this is a very specialized application that will fit when all the right stars align, rather than having the potential for large scale adoption.

QuantumSphere Inc. states that it uses ‘a special organic solution’ as a draw solution for seawater desalination. The diluted organic solution is then heated to cause the specially formulated organic solute to drop out. The purified water requires a final purification step through activated charcoal. Process energy costs are 70% less than traditional RO the company claims. This last purification step suggests to me that there could be some issues with traces of organics in the purified water after removal of the organic solute. If so, there will be some challenges in getting approval for the process from regulatory authorities plus there will be resistance from water utilities to use a process that adds then removes a possibly hazardous chemical to their water supply.

Unfortunately, I believe the use of FO for low energy desalination is still a long way off and in the meantime, gradual improvements in RO energy efficiency will lessen the benefits that FO has to offer.

A Promising Application

There is another very intriguing application for FO, where if you could convince the public to accept direct potable reuse of treated sewage, there are some real benefits that could be realized. This one application I saw presented in 2008 based on research carried out by the Colorado School of Mines (Cath). The application utilizes treated sewage or another impaired water source in a FO system to dilute seawater prior to desalination with RO (Figure 2).

With RO seawater desalination, most of the energy is used to overcome the osmotic pressure of the salt water and this high osmotic pressure limits the amount of pure water that can be recovered. In coastal areas, treated wastewater is being discharged to ocean, wasting a valuable resource. By using seawater as the draw solution and passing wastewater through the FO membrane prior to ocean discharge, purified wastewater can be used to dilute seawater prior to feeding to an RO system for desalination. The osmotic pressure of the seawater is then reduced which lowers the energy required for desalination and improves water recovery. Disposal of RO concentrate back to the ocean has always caused some environmental concerns, so a more dilute combination of FO and RO wastes may also overcome many of these concerns. An elegant solution, but with one big problem; this is essentially direct potable reuse!

Those with experience in the water and wastewater industry understand the public resistance to indirect potable reuse let alone direct reuse, no matter how elegant the solution is...

The Future?
If FO really did have potential for widespread application in the near to medium future, water tech savvy goliaths such as Veolia, Siemens or GE would have gobbled up the start-ups quicker than a rat up a drainpipe!

Don’t get me wrong though, I think FO has a future in specialized applications such as coastal areas in California where it is necessary to treat wastewater to a high standard, including desalination, for reinjection into the groundwater supply as a barrier to salt water intrusion (i.e. Orange County’s Water Factory 21). But, FO will not be the silver bullet to provide low energy desalinated drinking water unless there is a major shift in public attitude towards direct potable reuse.

Cath, T.Y., et al, “A novel hybrid forward osmosis process for drinking water augmentation using impaired water and saline water sources”, Water Reuse Association Annual WateReuse Symposium, Dallas, TX, 2008.

Using Research to Sell New Technologies

A valuable and underutilized strategy to facilitate the acceptance and ultimately sales of new technologies is research. I’m not about to suggest you start putting researchers on your sales force. And don’t ask your sales guys to wear lab coats either! But as part of the complex process required to introduce new technologies into the conservative water treatment market, a well thought out strategy involving academics who are recognized as experts in the field can be crucial to your success.

Facilitating Local Acceptance

The types of technologies I am talking about are not just slight variations on existing widgets, but where the technology is a significant step-change to the accepted methods traditionally used for achieving a treatment goal, i.e. the technology is a disruption to the conventional practice for meeting a water treatment objective. In the water treatment industry, disruptive solutions are typically viewed with extreme caution and therefore can take years to break into mainstream acceptance. Some great innovations may therefore never get commercialized.

The challenge in bringing these disruptive technologies to market is overcoming the perceived risk of being one of the first to adopt the technology. Don’t assume you can overcome local conservatism if your technology is well accepted on another continent or even in another state. Years ago I was delivering a presentation at an AWWA Section meeting in North Carolina on our Australian developed technology and was not asked if we had any installations in the U.S. but if we had any in that county!

A key component of our strategy to gain local acceptance was identifying well respected academics who could conduct research into the effectiveness of our technology on water sources around the U.S. Through reading technical publications and attending water industry conferences we were aware of which academics were actively conducting research in the applications where our technology could be used. It was also important that these researchers had a high credibility (and profile) in the fields where our technology could be applied and that they, or their students, had a track record in getting their research published and accepted for conference presentations.

No Free Lunch!

While any researcher is intrigued and excited by the prospect of working on a new technology and gaining a reputation as an expert in that technology, that alone is unlikely to get you your research for free. To get started, you must be prepared to fork out some cash to fund a post graduate student to do some work. This may range from $60-80K for a full-time masters student for one year or you may be able to negotiate 50% of a student for half this amount. The benefit of funding a student is that you then can have some influence over the type of research conducted and steer the work towards the needs of certain geographical regions or water types, etc where there are specific opportunities for your technology.

The Dominos Start Falling….

Assuming your technology is a winner, i.e. it outperforms the traditional alternative technologies, and this is then ‘discovered’ in the research, the papers and presentations will start to flow. And there can be a real multiplier effect from your initial investment. Here is what happened with our technology:

• Other researchers saw the promise of the technology and rather than be left behind by their peers, requested samples of our product to perform their own tests at no charge.
• The early academics we paid were also involved in industry funded research projects (AWWARF/WRF) that were investigating similar water treatment issues and they promoted the inclusion of our technology in these projects.
• These academics have also gained a reputation as independent experts in the application of our technology and have been included as paid research partners or peer reviewers for industry funded research projects where our technology has been evaluated.
• Students of these academics ultimately enter the water profession as consulting engineers representing water utilities or have moved up in academia. These students enter the industry as experts and advocates for our technology, confident in its capabilities.
• At this year’s AWWA Annual Conference & Exposition (ACE10) there were 11 presentations and posters on research and other projects involving our technology - only one of these involved research we had paid for.

I could go on with this list, but as you can see there has been a huge multiplier effect from that initial investment in research. Some of the tangible commercial outcomes have been new leads from water utilities and consultants who were referred to us after approaching the academics. Students who have entered the consulting field have also recommended our technology to their clients. There is also the more difficult to measure benefit of building the desired technology brand as a proven, accepted and exciting new technology that is market ready!

It still takes time…..

But you have to be realistic about how long it will take to bring your technology to market. It still takes several years to conduct the research, write the papers, get them accepted, published/presented, then start to spawn additional research and have students enter the industry. Notwithstanding, the use of research should be included as a key component of a well planned, long term product entry strategy to facilitate local acceptance and if properly executed can accelerate the introduction of your technology to market.

Spicing Up The Brown Bag!

Are you tired of making sales presentations to blank or disinterested faces? Are you fed up with buying lunch for people who are not the slightest bit interested in your product?

Well its time to put an end to the waste of time and money that is the traditional brown bag lunch presentation!

I would like to introduce to you a radically different approach to this worn out and abused sales tool, which quite frankly is not viable in these tough economic times!

In my article I will explain:

• What is a brown bag sales presentation and why sales people give them,
• Why I think the traditional brown bag is such a waste of time,
• Then I will introduce you to a new approach to the brown bag that I believe will give you a much better return for your time and money.

For those of you who are not in sales or are not familiar with the ‘brown bag’ term, a brown bag, is a sales presentation at a potential client’s office over lunch where the sales person orders in lunch. A more politically correct description is the “lunch-n-learn”. I have refused to use this term because lets get real – I am using lunch as bait to get some people to listen to me and most of the attendees are only there for the free food.

The target audience for Brown Bags in the water industry is engineering consultants. The objectives of the brown bag, for me, are to inspire a consultant to consider my product for an active project they are working on or get them to remember to consider the product when a suitable opportunity arises.

So what led me to rebel against the traditional brown bag?

It was last year in Washington State when I was travelling with a new regional sales manager that I was handing over the territory to. As part of the handover we were sharing the presentation load. This gave me the opportunity to watch the sales presentations and also watch the audience.

I saw little engagement from the audience and we didn’t get many quality questions. I realized that just about everyone in the industry was caught in the same brown bag rut – Delivering a 45 minute information dump covering every possible topic in the hope that something sticks and they get a lead.

With a considerable amount of our precious time, effort and travelling expenses put into these presentations we can’t afford to get very little return on this investment. I would therefore like to introduce you to a radical new approach to the brown bag. It is based around spicing up the process in which the content of the presentation is delivered.

New Approach:

In executing the brown bag there are three major objectives you should pay attention to;

• Focusing your content on the interests of the audience,
• Getting the audience actively engaged in your content, and
• Getting interaction from the audience so you can flush out new opportunities or get feedback on your product.

These objectives can be achieved as follows:

1/ The critical first step in preparing for your brown bag is not deciding what to eat, but breaking your presentation up into Discrete Modules.

This allows you to let the audience to select what information they want presented – I call it the ‘sushi menu’ approach. Your presentation can then be more focused and provide more depth on the specific areas of interest rather than be a general information dump.

2/ Getting the audience to select the topics goes a long way to helping get the audience engaged. Right at the start, before they eat, ask the audience to select what modules they would like you to present! Limit it to about three of up to 10 minutes each.

The audience has to pay attention, and by selecting topics, they will feel more obliged to listen and ask questions.

3/ Greater engagement then promotes audience interaction:

I want to ensure the brown-bag is a two-way meeting.
Without feedback you have pretty much wasted your time.

There is nothing more deflating than as soon as you have finished your 45 minute information dump, everybody immediately evacuates back to their offices without providing any feedback…

By presenting in modules, it allows you to:

• Break the presentation into chunks, keep the audience more alert and take questions while the topic is fresh (and check that the audience still has a pulse...), and
• Start with the topic of most interest so if you do run overtime, at least you have received feedback on the most important topics.

The proof in the pudding is in the eating.

One of our sales reps who recently used this approach at CH2M Hill said that he felt it was the most productive presentation he had given and the audience provided a rare compliment saying it was one of the most useful product presentations they had seen.

Our time is too precious to spend talking to uninterested audiences or to make a presentation that is a treasure hunt where we hope the listeners will stumble upon something of value.

I challenge you to stop going through the motions and spice up the brown bag presentation to better focus your content and ensure engagement and interaction from the audience and the results will speak for themselves.

How long can our water assets keep sweating?

Can we break the cycle of living beyond our means?

Continuing to run our water infrastructure into the ground without reinvesting to restore or replace these assets is like taking out one of those exotic interest-free mortgages without any plan on how to make the future high payments… For the majority of water systems where consumers continue to pay rates that do not factor in the depreciation of our water supply network, the end of this ‘interest free’ period is fast approaching!

Infrastructure 2010: Investment Imperative, a report recently released in April by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young, warns that by continuing to under invest in our water infrastructure the U.S. is not only threatening its quality of life both now and in the future, but it is also compromising its ability to compete economically with the rest of the world. The concern about the ever increasing future cost of renewing our water infrastructure has been raised by the EPA for many years and largely fallen on deaf ears. Hopefully the suggestion in this report that the rest of the world is gaining ground on the U.S. and that we may be left behind economically will strike a chord with politicians and push this issue up the priority list amongst the more sexy topics of healthcare, financial reform and clean energy.

The report states that “water profligacy is an American way of life….where very few ratepayers are charged the full cost to provide water and subsequently households and businesses use water inefficiently, even in areas where demand could soon outstrip supply”. I was amazed when I moved to Denver from Melbourne in 2000, to see nature strips on the fringes of the outer suburbs being watered in summer, in the middle of the day, where there were no houses. In a City that is in a high desert and is precariously balanced in supplying adequate water for a fast growing population, I could not believe there were not dual flush toilets which have been mandatory in all new houses in Melbourne for years, a City with twice the annual rainfall of Denver…… and Infrastructure 2010 shows that 27% of a household’s high quality treated drinking water goes down the toilet.

So back to our deteriorating infrastructure assets - those assets that were paid for by our ancestors and are the foundation on which the US economic powerhouse has been built. Perhaps the present generation’s treatment of these assets can be likened to the children that inherited the family fortune without having to work hard like their parents to earn it. To a large extent, society today is conditioned by the media for instant gratification, to live for the present, take out a line of credit on the house to go on a vacation or buy a new car and a 50 inch flat screen TV. A few years ago I heard a story of a ratepayer complaining after an increase in his water bill that it was now costing him almost as much as his cable bill. That pretty much sums up the perceived value put on water. God forbid that it would cost anything near an essential service such as cable! Soon our tap water bill will be as much as our monthly expenditure at Starbucks……

Hopefully it does not take catastrophic failures of our water assets, a loss of water supply or widespread water related sickness to get the public and therefore the politicians to approve the necessary $300-400B* repair/upgrade bill to renew these assets and then accept being charged for the true cost of providing water. Unfortunately, history suggests that this will be the case. Even in Australia, it was an extended drought, severe water restrictions and rapidly increasing cost of water that led to the change in public attitude which resulted in a significant reduction in household water use and major infrastructure upgrades. So it looks like we will continue to live for today, gorging water at minimal personal cost while our water infrastructure sweats away out-of-sight, until sometime in the future when the infrastructure debt collector comes to our door….

*USEPA’s “2007 Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment”.

Keep up with the times JAWWA!

March article ignores new technologies introduced in past 10 years….

I was disappointed with an article I saw published in the March 2010 issue of the Journal AWWA (American Waterworks Association) titled “Treatment alternatives for compliance with the Stage 2 D/DBPR: An economic update”.

My major concerns with this article as follows:

 1/ The technologies reviewed in this article were identified back in the 1990's as best available to meet new EPA drinking water standards for disinfection by-products (Stage 2 D/DBP Rule) that were originally scheduled to be implemented in 2005. Compliance dates for these standards have since been delayed until 2012-2014, depending on the water system size. Hello! It is now 2010 and a lot of new water treatment technologies have been developed and proven in the intervening period – so why no mention of these?? The JAWWA is supposed to be the go-to-publication for the latest and greatest in water treatment science and engineering, but the publication of this article suggests its editorial committee may be a decade or so behind the times....
2/ I take exception to the statement that "Among the precursor technologies examined, the data suggest that activated carbon continues to be the most cost effective method” (for compliance) and the assumptions used in arriving at this conclusion. In determining the activated carbon operating costs it was assumed that the carbon would be replaced on an annual basis. How many treatment plants using GAC are this lucky? Most plants using GAC that I know of have to change their carbon out every 2 to 3 months. It was OK to make this assumption in the 1990s when no large scale GAC systems had been installed yet for DBP compliance, but it is irresponsible to continue to use this assumption when there have since been many operating plants that demonstrate significantly higher carbon consumption rates.

I can only hope that water systems looking at ways to meet the future Stage 2 DBP standards do not use this article for technology selection and budgeting purposes or they could find themselves in a deep hole with their operating expenses, and not benefit from the findings from many water utilities that have gone through this pain already. I also hope the AWWA will follow up sooner rather than later with a more useful article that summarizes more realistic operating costs of existing installations - something like what was published in JAWWA in May 1996 on Nanofltration systems in Florida. I sent the editor a letter expressing my concerns and suggestions, so let’s see what the response is.

By the way, when I tried to check out the background to the company of the article’s author, while I couldn't find much, I did find out that the company is involved in the sales of activated carbon. Surprize, surprize......

 So how did the JAWWA editorial committee let this article get through? Obviously the committee consists of very experienced members of industry. Perhaps that is part of the problem. If their expertise was developed many years ago on the advanced technologies of that time, is it hard for these people to keep an open mind and accept that these technologies may no longer be at the cutting edge? The water industry has always been very conservative and slow to adopt new technologies, but with the increasing challenges presented by climate change and population growth we have to break out of the old mindset and look for new solutions. JAWWA should be at the forefront of the new thinking required to meet today's challenges!

My entry into the Blogosphere...

Welcome to the Water Cooler – what I hope will be interesting tidbits on the water and environmental industries plus my opinions on what I believe will help improve the health of the world we live in.

I would like to start by explaining what has driven me to set up this blog. After working in the water treatment/environmental industry for over 23 years, I have all of this pent up knowledge and opinions that I need to get out of my system and share with the world. I have been a sponge all of this time and now I would like to share some of the pearls of wisdom I have soaked up!

In my career so far I have probably written about 40 papers and articles and made a similar amount of presentations at industry conferences but these have all been around specific research or projects I have been involved in through my work. And let’s get serious – everyone who presents at a conference or writes an article is trying to sell something... Manufacturers are obviously promoting the benefits of their products, consultants are selling their expertise to potential clients and even academics are validating the value of their research to get funding and attract students.

So in this blog I hope to throw off the shackles of work and the biases that come with it and discuss and give opinions on issues in the water industry that are of interest to me. Maybe I will end up giving someone some good free advice. At a minimum I will get to vent some of my thoughts and ideas and perhaps generate some interesting debate. I may even branch out into other related topics close to my heart such as the sustainability (or not) of new water treatment processes and recycling of wastewater and produced water for high quality applications.

I welcome your opinions, suggestions and questions on any of the topics I choose to blog about. Let’s get started!