The construction has begun in an advanced advanced purification installation of 10 million gallons per day in El Paso, Texas: the first direct drinking reuse project in its type in the United States, the purified water will complement local drinking water supplies during dry stations and will reduce amounts that are removed from the Rio Grande.
The Paso Water (EP Water) worked with the Texas Environmental Quality Commission (TCEQ) for more than a decade to ensure that the drinking water produced in the installation will fulfill all the state and federal requirements. At the end of 2024, TCEQ granted the final approval of the design, allowing the construction to advance. Designed by Carollo Engineers, the Pure Water Center will be built by a joint PCL/Sundt company with a $ 295 million construction risk contract.
EP Water has been operating a pilot installation since 2016. Purification advanced processes include membrane filtration, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet filtration with advanced oxidation, granular activated carbon (GAC) and chlorine disinfection.
Gilbert Trejo, Vice President of the EP Water, required the pilot plant. “It was a learning process to understand all the sellers and technologies there.” The EP Water consulted with South California agencies and visited team makers.
The plant is part of the $ 1.2 million capital program from EP Water, which includes a retrofite of $ 595 million from the existing Roberto Bustamante Wastewater Treatment plant and a $ 230 million update from the Haskell installation, all also carried out by the joint company, says Ankur Talwar, a PCL Civil Infrastructure District District. The Bustamante plant will provide the water that goes to the new plant.
“Technology is running for decades and now the application reaches the lead,” says Talwar. “Now there are groups and organizations focused exclusively on purification.”
The crews work in a green field area on the Bustamante plant, starting with the reinforcement of the soil. “There will be several concrete structures, pipe connection installations below ground and pipes inside the footprint to connect the processes,” says Talwar. “Each of these technologies requires large teams.” Some 10.000 YDS of concrete will be placed and about 40,000 linear feet of pipes will be installed at the 13 -hectare site.
The installation will also serve as a de facto education/technology center, adds Nicholas Iannello, executive of the Sundt project. “You have to look good.”
The United States Claim Office granted $ 3.5 million in 2019 for the design of the installation and pledged additional $ 20 million by 2022 to support construction. Currently, the total cost of the project is estimated at $ 295 million and EP Water continues to achieve additional state and federal funding. Construction is expected to end in 2028.
The technical aspects of plant design were not as difficult as regulatory coordination, Caroline Russell, Vice President of Carollo and Technologist in Chief. “There are drinking water regulations for conventional groundwater sources.” But for some of the new processes, “we had to make petitions of exception.” The team had to develop the technical information that TCEQ needed to grant the permits.
Trojo adds: “We have joined forces to push the regulators outside their comfort zone. The regulators did not want to give us as much credit as we felt that our treatment did. Carollo did the calculations and the test to convince them that we deserve our treatment train. “”
“When we started preliminary engineering, we saw the opportunity to look at the main treatment train,” says Russell. “The water reuse field advances quickly. We looked at the advanced UV oxidation with hydrogen or chlorine peroxide and ways to configure the process of membrane filtration so that the flexibility occurs to incorporate new membranes as the market progresses.”
