Boise water treatment plant’s upgrades lead to award

A project costing $8.6 million that took nearly two years to complete is being lauded for its engineering efforts.

Engineers from Veolia Water, which operates Boise’s Columbia Water Treatment Plant, were honored last week with an Excellence in Engineering Award from the American Water Works Association.

The project centered around updating the plant’s water filtering technology while expanding water production capacity. A committee of engineers judged the applications submitted from projects in Idah, Oregon and Washington, and Veolia’s project scored highest and judges unanimously chose it as the one that would benefit customers the most.

According to Veolia’s nomination form, the plant’s membranes were beginning to degrade in 2021 and replacement would be necessary. The plant could choose to replace the membranes with the Memcor system it was already using, but operators decided to take “a longer view.”

The plant was originally built in 2005 and was meant to treat six million gallons of water a day, with the potential to treat up to 10 million gallons of water per day.

“The Columbia facility was … built with an understanding that it was serving a growing population with diverse water sources,” the nomination form stated. “In the years since it was built, population growth projections have only increased, making Veolia’s service area in Idaho’s Treasure Valley among the fastest growing regions in the United States. The growth was already manifesting in higher water demand, which the new project had to account for.”

Additional membrane systems being put into use would have increased need to 14 million gallons per day, and once the space was filled, “acquiring land and building additional water treatment plants would be prohibitively expensive for rate payers, even as the payer base grows every year. Veolia engineers found their solution in a revamped approach to membrane treatment that would require a system overhaul. It meant a more than 400% increase over a simple membrane replacement cost for the project, but it promises deep and lasting savings for the utility and rate payers for a generation.”

Veolia stated that as conditions or the marketplace changes, it will be able to replace the membranes regularly with a competitive market rant than being constrained by a specific brand’s costs.