Presenting at the 2022 AWWA Florida Section Fall Conference

Tuesday, November 29 | 11:00 – 11:30am, Session 1A Potable Reuse

Pure Water Monterey Northern California’s First Potable Reuse Program

Safe, reliable, and sustainable water supplies are critical for our businesses, agriculture, and communities. The changing climate, new regulations, and population growth are impacting already limited drinking water supplies in many regions. Pure Water Monterey (PWM), a $130M groundwater replenishment project, is providing a new source of drinking water to help diversify the Monterey Peninsula’s water supply and help restore stream flows in the Carmel River. PWM is a unique project because it utilizes four different sources of “wastewater” to produce new water for the region. These source waters are collected, purified, and used to recharge the Seaside Groundwater Basin and have been creating a new sustainable water supply for the Monterey Peninsula since February 2020. PWM is institutionally complex and requires many agreements between regional utilities, a private water company, agricultural entities, the California Public Utilities Commission, state/federal regulatory agencies, and other project stakeholders. The social, environmental, and economic benefits of this project are significant, and go well beyond the primary objective of creating over 3,500 acre-feet per year of new potable water supply.

Alex Page, PE, is a Principal at Kennedy Jenks and one of our Deputy Water Practice Leaders. Over the course of her career, Alex’s project experience has included the design, construction and start-up phases for various water treatment facilities, including her role as Project Engineer for the Pure Water Monterey Advanced Water Purification Facility. Alex is excited to share the Pure Water Monterey story with our #FSAWWA colleagues at the sections annual conference.

Tuesday, November 29 | 9:10 – 9:40am, Session 1C PFAS Treatment

Separation and Destruction of PFAS by a Hybrid Nanofiltration and UV-Sulfite Treatment Train – A Pilot-Scale Field Demonstration

PFAS remediation has largely focused on separation-based water treatment technologies such as adsorbents (e.g., granular activated carbon (GAC) and anion exchange resins (IX)); however, there is growing interest in technologies that can degrade PFASs. Recently, the hydrated electron, a highly reactive reductant generated by UV-sulfite photosensitizer processes has garnered attention due to its ability to reductively defluorinate a wide range of PFASs. While destruction of PFASs is desirable, direct treatment of contaminated water supplies with these technologies may not be practical due to their large energy requirements per unit volume of water treated. Instead, destruction is anticipated to be more practical when applied to treat small volume concentrate streams generated as byproducts of separation-based processes, including high-pressure membrane (e.g., nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO)) reject concentrate streams. This presentation reports on the field demonstration of a pilot-scale hybrid NF and UV-sulfite treatment train for the combined separation and destruction of PFAS in groundwater impacted by firefighting foams.

Dr. Charlie Liu is in the Applied Research Group at Kennedy Jenks. His research focuses on the remediation of per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in pilot-scale applications of advanced treatment technologies including adsorbents, high-pressure membranes, and UV based destructive technologies and Charlie has published several first and co-authored papers on PFAS remediation. Charlie obtained his Ph.D. and M.S. in Environmental Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California San Diego.