Sludge Watch ==> Ostara BC -Edmonton- recovers pollutants into 'fertilizer'

[Maureen Reilly]

http://www.tigardtimes.com/sustainable/story.php?story_id=118299244908679800

CWS’s Durham treatment plant sludge just may smell like money
New treatment process recovers nutrients from sewage and turns it into a 
marketable ‘green’ fertilizer
By Barbara Sherman

The Times, Jun 27, 2007

TIGARD – The potential marriage of Clean Water Services with Ostara Nutrient 
Recovery Technologies Inc. is a match made in heaven – or as close as it 
gets when the topic is sewage sludge.

Sewage treatment plants, including CWS’s Durham Advanced Wastewater 
Treatment Facility, have an ongoing problem dealing with phosphorus and 
other nutrients because the treatment process releases nutrients from the 
sludge that increases operation costs and consumes plant capacity

What if the nutrients could be removed and turned into a marketable product 
that would earn the plant money?

Enter Ostara, a Vancouver, B.C., company founded in 2005 to recover 
resources from wastewater and recycle them into commercial products.

Ostara’s struvite-recovery process recovers pollutants, helps 
wastewater-treatment plants reduce operating costs and meet environmental 
regulations while also providing municipalities and utilities with revenue 
by creating an environmentally safe slow-release fertilizer.

The CWS Durham plant is now in the middle of a six-to-eight-week-long pilot 
project using the technology and is only the second place in the United 
States to test the process after a successful trial in Suffolk, Va., at the 
Hampton Roads Sanitation District’s Nansemond Wastewater Treatment Plant.

F. Phillip Abrary, president of Ostara, recently spent a day at the CWS 
plant leading tours of the project along with Rob Baur, a CWS operations 
analyst II.

In a nutshell, raw sewage enters the plant and goes through a primary 
treatment in which sludge settles to the bottom, a secondary treatment in 
which bacteria break down organics, and then a tertiary treatment where 
phosphorus is removed and particles are filtered out, and then the flow is 
disinfected before discharge into the Tualatin River.

The sludges produced then go through the anaerobic digesters and come out as 
bio-solids, which are spread on farmland on plants not destined for human 
consumption, or liquids, which go through the process again. The Ostara 
plant, called a reactor, processes the sludge liquids and recovers 
phosphorus and ammonia, converting them to fertilizer, thereby cutting down 
on the amount of ammonia and phosphorus to be processed a second time by the 
plant.

“Thirty percent of the phosphorus and ammonia coming into the plant is from 
the plant’s sludge de-watering process,” Baur said. “The Tualatin River is 
slow moving, and phosphorus can stimulate algae growth. We have one of the 
most stringent phosphorus-level restrictions in the county here because we 
discharge into the Tualatin River. Many other plants around the country have 
no restrictions on phosphorus levels.”

In fact, CWS, won the “Plant of the Year” award from the EPA for the Durham 
plant in 2005 and the Rock Creek plant in 2006 and holds a patent for the 
process it uses to ferment sludge to encourage biological phosphorus 
removal. It licenses the process to treatment plants around the country to 
use.

“We have such strict limits that we must be state of the art,” Baur said.

Development on the new environmentally friendly Ostara technology started in 
1999 at the University of British Columbia, and the company was formed to 
take it from pilot project to business-ready on a scale that would be 
commercially feasible, according to Abrary.

The company’s first commercial-scale plant began operation in Edmonton, 
Alberta, last month, and the first fertilizer, called Crystal Green, is 
being produced for commercial distribution.

“Ostara is bringing state of the art to biological phosphorus removal,” 
noted Baur. “What we hope to get out of this is data for our facilities’ 
master plan that we are now in the process of creating. It includes our need 
for expansion, how big the footprint should be and if the Ostara process is 
cost effective when construction costs are included.

“Our construction costs may be higher than the cost of the actual (Ostara) 
unit. The pilot project is an opportunity for us to see how efficiently and 
how well it works. We are only treating a small stream in the pilot project 
– approximately 1/300 of our capacity.”

Leading the way to where the Ostara equipment had been installed in only a 
day, Abrary said, “This is where the magic happens. It’s like an oyster 
making a pearl.”

Pointing to a tall, translucent column of effluent with small flecks 
churning around, Abrary explained, “What we’re seeing is crystals made of 
phosphorus, ammonia and magnesium, all important plant nutrients.”

Without the Ostara process to remove the phosphorus and other nutrients, 
they can turn into a concrete-like substance called struvite that gums up 
the equipment.

Picking up a block of the hardened substance removed from a pipe, Abrary 
said, “This is what would form if it wasn’t being turned into pellets. A 
day’s worth of the pellets (from the pilot project) would fit into any 
fertilizer spreader. It doesn’t leach back into the environment, and it 
becomes a high-grade, commercial fertilizer when we add magnesium chloride 
to the ammonia and phosphorus and removes those nutrients from the treatment 
plant.

“The value of the fertilizer covers 100 percent of the procedure’s operating 
costs. It doesn’t cost the plant anything to run once it’s installed – it’s 
very simple, and it uses very little energy.”

The capital cost of a reactor facility ranges between $2 million and $4 
million, with the maintenance and capacity cost savings and fertilizer 
revenue making up the cost within three to five years.

In addition, a company utilizing the technology can get 4 to 6 tons of 
greenhouse gas credits for every ton of fertilizer it produces, according to 
Abrary.

“Fertilizer is typically made in big plants and shipped for long distances,” 
he said. “This is made and can be used locally.”

As great as the new technology appears to be, CWS would need two to three 
years “at the earliest” to get it up and running since data is not yet 
available from a full-sized reactor. CWS would need to analyze the financial 
impact and where it would be located at the plant, Baur said. For example, 
the small tube in the pilot project that is only a few inches in diameter 
would need to be 22 feet in diameter at the top to treat one third of Durham 
plant’s capacity so three or more would be needed.

“We need to be more green in the future,” he said. “We try to anticipate 
technology changes. It’s part science and part art.”

As for the actual operation, Abrary explained, “We can built it, and CWS 
would contract with us to run and maintain it, or they could build it and 
run it themselves.”

CWS is the site of the nation’s second pilot project due to an encounter at 
a water environment conference when Ostara attended a presentation by Baur 
on how CWS solved its struvite problem. Ostara tried one of the solutions, 
and it improved the operation of the pilot.

That was the inroad that Ostara needed to start a mutually beneficial pilot 
project with CWS with the potential to turn all that phosphorus into cash 
and a ‘green’ fertilizer.