Monday, 4 May 2015

RITE Planners Update #5 - Monday May 4, 2015


Introduction

The R.I.T.E plan has been validated.
Last Wednesday, thanks to the leadership of Lisa Helps, the public and the CRD had a very Respectful discussion. That is the R we’ve been asking for.   Seems like this will continue too!
Last week, at the Westside Innovation presentations, we heard from a local vendor who confirmed the I, T, and E is feasible too!
Innovative water treatment that produces fully reusable water combined with locally manufactured gasification systems to handle the residuals; all done with redundancy; modularity and using existing pipes in the ground.
Taxpayer friendly because the capital costs are, as we've been saying for years, significantly lower than the Seaterra plan. PLUS we can make money each year.
Environmentally beneficial because the water is fully reusable and the toxins in the residual solids are completely destroyed leaving a biochar product with many uses.
RITE was right! For years some people have discounted our observations saying there were no hard numbers. Well now we've been vindicated.


Reset Trust With a Respectful Dialog

Last week’s public event at the Royal BC Museum was a success. Lisa Helps has welcomed the audience and outlined what has changed. She acknowledges that the past has been a collective failure but now we have a collective opportunity to succeed.  She set a tone that the audience clearly liked.  
After the event I had the privilege to listen to the professional facilitators who came to help.  They were excited and clearly thought the event was a success.  One facilitator said the people at his round table had a lot of tension. They were very distrustful and angry about the past. Yet they set those tensions aside to share information with fellow citizens.
Another memorable quote:  “It was a valuable evening and, for the first time ever, I did not leave angry and feeling completely disenfranchised.”

Compared to every other CRD sponsored sewage event these past years this event was a turning point.

One critical metric to watch for: will the collected information disappear into CRD offices? or will it come back to each and every public event?   I’ve been told the goal is to bring this information back each time so these conversations build on each other.  Transparency at work builds trust.


How is that possible? Sewage treatment for so cheap?
How is it possible the whole region’s sewage can be treated for, perhaps, $250 million?  That seems impossible considering the CRD/Seaterra plan was $782 million.

Well, it is not hard to explain.  Just break the project into Water, Conveyance, and Residuals.




Water Treatment
The Seaterra estimate to build the secondary waste water treatment facility is, $179 million.  The vendor’s estimate is $200 million, for tertiary distributed. Many vendors of wastewater systems are promoting systems that are smaller and more efficient.   For sake of discussion, let’s be conservative and increase the vendor’s estimate by 50% to $300 million.

Tertiary costs more than secondary. No question. But ….

Conveyance


Seaterra’s McLoughlin project was estimated to cost $365 million.  As noted above the secondary treatment is estimated at $179 Million.  That is $186 million in tunnels, outfalls and extra stuff that is NOT needed with distributed tertiary.  But, the Seaterra plan also includes big projects like pump stations and attenuation tanks.  Total cost for tunnels, ocean outfalls, attenuation tanks and pump stations: $272 million.

The vendor said none of this is needed if you do distributed tertiary.  No need for ocean outfalls, no need for over sizing the plant because the distributed facilities provide redundancy.  No need for attenuation tanks or pump stations because you treat the sewage where it is now. You use existing pipes.

Let’s be conservative and say the vendor is wrong and we need, ballpark, $50 million for a few new pipes or whatever.  (or to go towards what has been spent so far!)

References:
782 total - 330 Hartland - 180 McLoughlin wastewater only  = 272 extras.

Residuals: Bio-digestion vs. Gasification

Here is where we save a lot.  Seaterra’s plan spends $330 million to run a 18 km pipe from the ocean up to Hartland Landfill and back again. It uses anaerobic digestion to convert roughly half the residuals into methane gas (20x worse than CO2) and leaves the rest to be used “beneficially” up island (which means the residuals will be spread on land).

Contrast this with gasification: which is cheap.   Hamilton Ontario is building a gasifier to treat 170,000 tonnes of municipal waste and sewage sludge for $37 million.  The vendor, Pivotal IRM, says they can do all this region for $50 million;  we’ve talked with other experts who are working on projects for sewage sludge alone that cost just $20 million.  So, clearly, gasification is cheap compared to anaerobic digestion at Hartland.
Our conservative estimate: $75 million yet, clearly, this is an area where we can save more.
Vendor’s estimate $50 million.
Seaterra project $330 million.


Totals

Seaterra capital costs $782 million
Tertiary Distributes with Gasification (conservative estimate) $425 million
Tertiary Distributes with Gasification (vendor estimate) $250 million

The vendor’s estimate is attractive but whether you think it is true or not it is clear that we need to explore the options of Tertiary Distributed wastewater treatment combined with Gasification for residuals.

And we haven’t even mentioned the amazing other benefits of this approach
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