Dealing with our state’s water needs will require lots of different types of solutions.
By 2028, El Pasoans will begin receiving water from a $295 million advanced water purification plant that will convert treated wastewater into drinking water, the first facility of its kind in the nation, El Paso Water officials said.
The concept of treating sewage water to drinkable standards and returning it back into a city’s drinking water system is far from new. But El Paso will be the first city with a large-scale treatment plant that treats wastewater to drinkable standards and then deposits the water directly back into the city’s drinking water system.
El Paso Water’s new facility, called the Pure Water Center, will sit next to the utility’s R.R. Bustamante Wastewater Treatment Plant in the Lower Valley, just south of the Ysleta-Zaragoza International Bridge. The plant will produce up to 10 million gallons of drinking water per day when it’s up-and-running. That’s enough to meet about 9% of the city’s demand for water on an average day.
“This is the ultimate level of water recycling,” said Gilbert Trejo, El Paso Water’s vice president of engineering, operations and technical services. “What’s the most efficient and cost-effective way to produce a drought-proof, drought-resilient water source? It’s this project.”
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Many cities for decades have utilized plants that treat wastewater into drinking water, then release the water back into the environment – such as a riverbed or reservoir – and re-capture the water months or years later and place it back into the drinking water system.
“The modern practice of water recycling really got going in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s,” said David Sedlak, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
He pointed to a water recycling plant in Orange County, California, that produces 70 million gallons of drinking water daily from wastewater, and has been recycling wastewater since the 1970s. Another treatment plant in Northern Virginia began utilizing potable water reuse technologies in the late 1970s to provide drinking water to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., amid population growth.
And since 1985, the Fred Hervey Water Reclamation Plant in northeastern El Paso County has converted millions gallons of sewage every day into potable water that’s used for industry and irrigation, but also to be pumped back into the underground Hueco Bolson aquifer that’s a key source of drinking water for El Paso.
“El Paso Water customers have known and have been supporting water recycling projects since the 1960s, when the first drop of reclaimed water reached Ascarate Golf Course. And then Fred Hervey Water Reclamation facility in 1985,” Trejo said.
The difference between El Paso Water’s new Pure Water Center – called a direct potable reuse facility – and similar indirect potable reuse water treatment plants like the Hervey facility is that this new plant in El Paso removes the “environmental buffer.” That means the treated wastewater goes directly into the city’s drinking water system instead of out into the environment first.
Sedlak said the environmental buffer has been a kind of psychological barrier that’s made indirect potable reuse acceptable to water consumers in the U.S. for years. Still, water pumped directly back into the drinking water system may be cleaner than water released into nature and later recollected, he said.
“Culturally, people feel very comfortable with the idea of putting the water in the environment and retaking it,” Sedlak said.
“Until people started thinking about, ‘Gee, you know, sometimes when we put the water out in the environment, it gets dirtier,’” he said. “You put it out in a river or lake or reservoir, and that lake or reservoir has got agricultural drainage water coming in, or it’s got housing or it’s got industry upstream, and suddenly the water gets dirtier.”
Customers often prefer the taste of recycled water because it’s more purified and has less salt than most other water sources, especially in cities in the southwestern U.S., Sedlak said.
We face a lot of challenges for water in this state, between population growth, climate change, increased demand from data centers and (ugh) cryptominers, old infrastructure, and just the fact that a significant part of the state is in a very dry climate. Solutions include conservation, fixing leaks, desalinization, and more. I hadn’t thought about the “psychological barrier” of putting treated wastewater back into the environment rather than just use it for drinking straightaway, but I suppose this is a sign that we need to get over ourselves and do whatever works. We’re going to need a lot more of this.
Yeah, if you’ve seen Lake Travis in the past 15 years or so, you know the current practices and trends are not sustainable.