Elyria eyes uses for wastewater treatment byproducts

Residents pay Elyria to take their wastewater away, now the city is exploring ways it could dispose of the byproducts of that waste more sustainably — perhaps even in a way that makes the city some money. Elyria Wastewater Plant Superintendent Shayne Stewart will go before City Council with a request to approve an extensive study of the plant to review how it can be more sustainable and efficient and determine where upgrades may be needed. As the plant faces skyrocketing electrical costs like most Elyrians, the study would also explore ways that the city could use or sell the byproducts of its wastewater treatment process: biosolids and methane gas. The amount of methane produced by the plant could potentially be profitable, and is equivalent to 145,000 gallons of the natural gas. Stewart presented the proposed study to Elyria's Joint Community Development and Finance Committee on Monday, and the committee voted to send the proposed study before Council for a vote. If the study is approved, the city would enter into a contract with Brown and Caldwell, an environmental engineering consulting firm from Columbus, which would carry out the study in partnership with city personnel for a cost not to exceed $441,000. Stewart said that Brown and Caldwell was selected from among 16 firms that applied to do the study. The money has already been appropriated for 2025, if Council chooses to approve the study. "We are doing this to build a road map," Stewart said. "... There is no straight path that we know we need to go on. I don't know what (the plant) is going to look like in 20 years, what the costs will be like… It seems like a big upfront cost, of $440,000, but the reality in the long term (is) we will be able to do this study one time. We are not going to have to come back in five years and say this changed, we have to do it again. It's a very fluid model that they use." The Elyria Wastewater Pollution Control Plant Originally built in 1929 as the Elyria Wastewater Treatment Plant, a name which is often still used, the plant received major upgrades in the 1960s and 1980s, but has not had many infrastructure changes since. Wastewater from homes and businesses across Elyria is pumped into the plant where the biosolids in the water are separated out and both are treated. After treatment, the solids are disposed of at the Republic Services Landfill, while water is returned to the Black River after extensive testing. The plant treats an average of 8 million gallons of wastewater per day with a daily capacity of 13 million gallons and a peak flow capacity of 30 million gallons. As part of an unfunded consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reduce sewage runoff into the Black River, the city must increase its peak flow capacity to 40 million gallons. In 2024, the plant treated a total of 2.75 billion gallons of water, Stewart told the joint committee. "Biosolids are a byproduct of wastewater, they are all the organics that come to the plant. We can use our imagination as far as what that is," Stewart said. "So we remove those mechanically and biologically." After solids, including solid bodily waste, are removed from the wastewater, they are pumped into anaerobic digesters. Anaerobic digestion is a process in which organic waste is broken down by microbial colonies in the absence of oxygen, thus the term "anaerobic." "We call it sludge, biosolids, organic material, it is pumped to these anaerobic digesters and it is heated to 98 degrees Fahrenheit," Stewart said. "It has bacteria just like us, so think of it as similar to your stomach. (The bacteria) need food, and their food is the organic sludge that we send to it." This process reduces the smell of the waste and the volume of sludge and also kills pathogens, making it safe to transport. The two main byproducts of the digestion process are methane gas, produced as waste by the bacteria eating the waste, and digestate, which is the remains of the biosolids. Digestate is a nutrient dense, dirt-like material. Stewart Elyria's wastewater treatment plant currently produces 350 "wet tons" of biosolid waste per month, which amounts to 86 million tons per year. The plant also produces 3000 cubic feet of methane per hour, which adds up to 26 million cubic feet per year. Methane gas and electricity With so much methane produced as a byproduct of the wastewater treatment process, Elyria currently has no way to dispose of it other than burning it, which Stewart said is done because methane is more dangerous to release into the air than the carbon dioxide produced by burning it. "So 26 million cubic feet of methane, it is tough to kind of comprehend how large of a number that is," Stewart said. "That's about 145,000 gallons of gasoline per year that we create and just burn. There's no reuse for it currently, we call it the 'never ending flame.'" That flame is a 5-foot-tall flame which stands atop a tower at the plant which burns constantly. Stewart said that the methane produced by the plant is burned because it is less harmful to release carbon dioxide into that air than to release unburnt methane. If captured and used, that methane could produce 2.6 million kilowatt hours per year of energy; enough to power 257 homes for the year. "Why this matters is obviously to help the environment, that's what we are mainly here to do, but also there is a huge cost in our operations," Stewart said. "I've talked about this before, but we are seeing that increase even more rapidly." The Elyria wastewater plant spends $450,000 annually on electricity alone, and Stewart said this cost will only increase starting this year following a massive uptick in energy costs. Last year, at an auction by electric grid operator PJM Interconnection, capacity prices for electricity soared by 830 percent, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. Prices increased by an additional 22 percent this year, though Ohio energy customers did not see the impact of the massive jump until July of this year. In July, Stewart said, the wastewater plant's electric bill rose from $36,000 the month before to $50,000. With this increase expected to stick around, that would make the plant's new annual electric bill about $600,000. The wastewater plant and the city's Water Pumping Plant are by far the highest energy users in the city government. The study, Stewart said, will review the feasibility of using the methane it produces to run a generator on site and offset current electrical costs. He said that current calculations show the city could cut its annual electric bill in half if such a generator was installed. "Doing quick math on this, the methane piece, being able to operate a generator save 50 percent on our electric (costs), if we could do that, two years worth of service of a methane generator would pay for this entire study in itself," Councilman Phil Tollett, D-At-Large, said. Another possibility which the study will review is the idea of installing methane cleaning equipment and a pipeline to divert and sell methane to Columbia Gas. If either plan were implemented, the city could start accepting fats, oils and greases, or FOG, for disposal, which would produce more methane gas when it is digested. This would mostly consist of accepting restaurant grease into the wastewater treatment system. "The digesters love FOG, it is very volatile in organic compounds and it will supercharge (the sludge) and create tons of methane," Stewart said. Reuse of biosolids After the solids at the plant have been digested, water is removed until the sludge is made up of 25 percent solid waste and it is then transported to be disposed of at the Republic Services Landfill. Stewart said that rather than simply throwing this sludge away, the city could instead use the treated waste for a number of useful applications. "Now, instead of being a waste, we can use this as a resource," he said. "Land application, compost, nutrient energy recovery, these are all the new technologies out there that we will be exploring as part of the study." Elyria's wastewater treatment plant currently produces 350 "wet tons" of biosolid waste per month, which amounts to 86 million tons per year. The city pays about $400,000 a year for biosolids disposal and Stewart said the city gets a "very good rate," but selling treated biosolids to be turned into useful products would cut the cost. That option is something else the study would review, along with possible land application and composting use. "Instead of going to the landfill with our biosolids, if we don't want to use them on land application, some communities are actually selling it," Stewart said. "You can treat it so well that you can sell it as a fertilizer." That fertilizer could be sold in bulk to manufacturers or farmers, or sold in smaller quantities to local residents. Councilman Kenny Oswald, D-4th Ward, asked Stewart if there would be enough demand for this fertilizer for the city to sell it all, or if it would end up dumping a portion at the landfill anyway. Stewart said that demand would be a part of the study, but he pointed to the example of Oberlin, which actually buys farmland, leases it to farmers and spreads its fertilizer from wastewater treatment on those plots. In addition to exploring opportunities to put the byproducts of wastewater treatment to use, the study will also explore possible future EPA regulations, the plant's total reliance on the landfill for disposal and the possibility of needing new equipment. Two of the plant's digesters are over 100 years old, having been built with the original plant in 1929. The hope is that by reviewing and analyzing the plant's data over previous decades through the study, the city can develop plans for different eventualities of future needs and regulations. "All options that they are going to look at, we are not going to really leave any of it off the table, so we can figure out what's best for our plan" Stewart said. "We have looked at a lot, but we really want to dial in on Elyria and what is best for the Elyria Wastewater Treatment Plant." Council will vote on whether to enter into the contract with Brown and Caldwell at its next meeting on Oct. 6. Contact Owen MacMillan at (440) 329-7123 or omacmillan@chroniclet.com.