It was a little luck and a lot of determination that the City of Oceanside had the opportunity to make history by becoming the first Advanced Water Purification Facility in San Diego County in the final days of 2021. What ultimately drove the project to completion had nothing to do with becoming the first in the county to complete a Pure Water Project but had everything to do with saving the City and, ultimately, the ratepayers millions of dollars.
“In order to receive the state conservation credits (SB 606), we needed the project to be up and running (as an existing facility) by Jan. 1, 2022,” Chief Plant Operator Ron Lutge said.
Rudy Guzman, Water Utilities Division Manager, feels they were lucky to finish and be operational on Dec. 30, 2021. He says, “We had to get it done in under two years from groundbreaking to production, and a lot of the work was done during COVID-19 restrictions.”
Guzman thinks that the City of San Diego ran into some significant delays while building their program. Otherwise, San Diego might have been the first.
“I guess you could call it luck that we were the first in the County to produce advanced treated water, but that was not our first concern. In hindsight, I think I would have rather learned lessons from the challenges of others. I think those ‘others’ are now learning from us,” he said.
Oceanside’s journey to pure water began during a 2009 City Council goal-setting workshop when water conservation was on the agenda. At that time, the state was in the midst of yet another drought, and the community was grappling with the worry of what the future would look like if water continued being imported from the already heavily burdened Colorado River, 250 miles away, and the Bay-Delta Project, 450 miles away. There were also concerns that imported water is susceptible to increasing costs, requires significant energy for transportation, and is prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes.
“The ideas from the discussion were to either work on a desalination facility, expand the recycled water program, or indirect potable reuse,” said City of Oceanside Water Utilities Division Manager Rudy Guzman.
At a 2013 workshop, the Council refined its water conservation idea during the City’s strategic plan studies and adopted a goal of locally sourcing 50% of all potable water needed. This led to various studies from 2010 to 2017, including seawater desalination and advanced water purification treatment.
The decision to build an advanced water purification facility (AWPF) was largely determined by cost. The studies found that purifying wastewater is about one-third the cost of ocean desalination because there are far fewer dissolved solids (salts) to remove from wastewater. Removing a high concentration of salts requires three times more energy and additional membranes and results in a shorter membrane life span, leading to increased maintenance costs.
In the end, the $70 million water reuse project consisted of constructing a new AWPF, as well as expanding the existing recycled water distribution system. The project uses treated wastewater from the San Luis Rey Water Reclamation Facility (SLRWRF), which treats the majority of Oceanside’s water to state discharge standards and supplies the Pure Water Oceanside facility through ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis (RO), and advanced oxidation. Adding the AWPF will produce an additional 4.5 MGD of high-quality recycled water.
A small portion of the City’s water supply is sourced locally from a naturally occurring underground aquifer known as the Mission Basin. Established in 1992, the Mission Basin Groundwater Purification Facility (MBGPF) is the oldest functioning groundwater plant in the county. Guzman explained that it is not surprising that the aquifer’s water quality has been declining after more than 30 years of use. In recent years, Oceanside has been challenged by the Mission Basin, as it lacks sufficient natural sources of recharge.
“Now that the advanced purification facility is up and running, recycled water goes through the water purification process and is injected into three wells that send the water to the Mission Basin,” Guzman said. “The injection into the wells replenishes the groundwater and improves overall water quality in the aquifer.”
Although extensive planning went into constructing the AWPF, since becoming operational, the crew has encountered instances where the system required reevaluation and modifications.
“There were obvious design errors starting out,” Lutge said. “There were also concerns and issues during building, but the push to meet deadlines put the issues aside to be taken care of at a later date.”
Since the AWPF became operational, it has been running in “spurts” when equipment issues suddenly arise. The staff has needed to redesign things, specify the proper equipment, and slowly finalize specific projects. All of which takes time.
Guzman explained that this type of project has complicated and extensive controls and programming needs and really needs programming integrators who have done this before.
“The technology is sound,” he said. “But we’ve experienced problems like air compressors being half the size they should have been or a pump not being the right fit.”
Guzman said that Oceanside would have benefited greatly from a significant pilot program like Padre Dam’s. Padre Dam put together a two-year pilot program that tested various aspects of advanced water purification. The region is currently going through the permit stage of building the East County Advanced Water Purification Facility.
“Every water system is different,” Guzman said. “It (the pilot program) would have given us a chance to understand how water is affected in different stages and would have given us an opportunity to train staff on new technologies.”
He mentioned that one of the best decisions Oceanside made was to have an independent engineer review selected portions of the designs and make any necessary recommendations. It’s also beneficial to have a consultant on staff who can assist with meeting regulatory requirements. Projects like this involve working with several different regulatory agencies.
“Overall, it has been a difficult process, and we have experienced many challenges and learned a lot along the way,” Lutge said.
My Profile
