Blatant Reality

A wastewater treatment plant in Hopewell, Virginia is going to be using algae to treat their sewage.This plant will be using the firm Algae Wheel, a company that I have blogged about in the past, to use their algae technology to purify the plant’s waste.

The city has gone green by launching a new algae demonstration project at the Regional Wastewater Treatment Facility.

For the next nine months, algae will be used to clean wastewater from nitrogen instead of conventionally engineered solutions.

City officials call this new technology a cost-saving green approach to nutrient removal, resulting in cleaner river water. The method also produces a welcomed by-product – bio fuel and green coal, produced from algae residue.

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Excess nitrogen in the plant’s discharge is one of the main challenges of wastewater treatment, and the regional plant is currently not designed to remove nitrogen.

“If we upgraded our plant to combat nitrogen by conventional solutions, it would cost about $90 million,” Haley said.

Removing nitrogen and phosphorus from waterways is a major undertaking that ultimately affects citizens through higher sewer rates.

Algae would therefore be used to combat the excess nitrogen. While the actual cost savings are unknown since this will be one of the first such plants in operation, hopefully it will prove much more viable then the $90 million conventional means.