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Upgrade is credit to water treatment planning
Upgrade is credit to water treatment planning
By Bill Walsh
Times-Democrat Staff Writer
Capping carbon emissions, then allowing companies that are under their allowance to trade their extra pollution capacity, is being debated in Washington as, at least, a first step in getting a handle on global warming.
Though still a few years distant, the Town of Warrenton is likely to find itself in the driver's seat in another cap-and-trade scenario.
A Biological Nutrient Reduction upgrade at the town's wastewater treatment plant has been underway since about the first of the year. The approximately $7 million project is scheduled for completion early in 2009.
Town officials are confident that after the new treatment component comes on line next summer, they will be under their permit's cap for nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus primarily — and able to sell polluting credits to other municipalities which have not yet been able to meet the mandates of the state's Chesapeake Bay clean-up legislation.
In rough order of magnitude, the sewage treatment plant will reduce its release of nitrogen by 85 percent to 95 percent, and will, plant superintendent Bill Stoddard said, fall comfortably below state mandates.
"We saw this coming at the time of our last permit renewal, and started on the design two years ago," Director of Public Works Edward 'Bo' Tucker said. "It was bid out and a contract was awarded in January 2008."
The DEQ permit under which the plant operates calculated the town's new nutrient-release cap based on the plant's total capacity, which is 2.5 million gallons per day. But the plant is currently processing about 1.7 million gallons of effluent daily.
With the new filtering upgrade in place and the plant operating below capacity, Warrenton will be significantly below its pollution limit, and able to sell the unused portion to a town or city elsewhere in the state that cannot yet meet its limit.
"The state is setting up sort of a commodity's market for trading where if there is a plant in another part of the state that is not going to make its limits, it can actually buy credits from us," Tucker explained. "The state is looking at overall reduction. They want everybody to get on board, but some are a little bit slower than others."
Selling credits won't last forever.
Using historic and planning department projections, growth will drive the treatment plant to capacity in about 2016, Tucker said.
"We're lucky that we were able to get out on the front end of this," Tucker added, "and we're not playing catch-up"
The upgrade is being built with a state grant that covers 45 percent of the cost. Ratepayers, Tucker said, will likely not be affected by the town's 55 percent share.
Rates may go up in the years ahead, Tucker said, but "not to pay for this.
"Every year in our budget process, we look at revenue and expenses. There hasn't been a rate increase since the mid 1990s. At this point, I just can't say, but this project is funded and won't have an impact [on rates]," he said.
Essentially what the new facility will add to existing wastewater treatment is a process that converts ammonia to nitrite, then to nitrate, and finally to gaseous nitrogen and oxygen, which will be released, harmlessly, into the atmosphere, Stoddard said.
"We breath it anyway," Stoddard said of nitrogen; "it's part of our atmosphere."
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