Quincy system will reuse lots and lots of water

QUINCY — It’s a system that can best be described with superlatives.

Thirty-five miles of pipes connecting three facilities. Eighty pumps of various sizes, speeds and capacities capable of providing 2,500 gallons of water per minute — enough to fill 1.2 million 16-ounce bottles in an hour.

And 14 years and “tens of millions” of dollars.

That’s what it took to finish what can be described as the first phase of the Quincy Water Reuse Utility (QWRU), which will help treat and reuse water pumped from the ground and used to cool the growing data centers in the city.

The goal is to reduce reliance on potable water for cooling. The complex filtration system won’t completely end reliance on potable well water for the city’s data centers, however. So far, Microsoft, which bankrolled much of the facility’s construction and began work on the system in 2008, is the only data center connected.

“At Microsoft, we are committed to being water positive as a company by the end of the decade, and this means we need to reduce our own water usage in our data centers in every way that we can,” said Diana Hasegan, a principal engineer with the Redmond-based software giant. “And it will also mean replenishing the water that we use to the communities that we take it from.”

Of the 409 million gallons of water used for cooling each year, 138 million will come from the reuse system and another 260 million of municipal and industrial water will come from the West Canal, leaving only 11,000 needed from the city’s wells.

“This year, we’re going to be able to replace enough water with makeup water or reuse water for about 5,000 residents for a year,” said Bob Davis, a program manager for Worley, the Australia-based engineering firm which oversaw construction of the treatment and reuse facility. “That’s a fairly good thing.”

“It’s taken 14 years to get here, and we’re here, and it’s working,” Davis said.

Davis was one of a number of project leaders and local elected officials to gather at the Quincy Valley Business and Conference Center on June 30 to celebrate the system was formally operating as “a closed loop” and providing treated and filtered water to Microsoft’s data centers.

If there is anything that limits growth and development in the Columbia Basin, it is water. Sitting in the rain shadow of the Cascades, the region is a semi-desert, home primarily to jackrabbits, coyotes ands sagebrush — lots and lots of sagebrush. Without the Columbia Basin Project providing water to 671,000 acres (of the slightly more than 1 million authorized by Congress when the project was established), it would not be possible to grow much of anything except wheat and barley, and it is likely few could make a living in the region.

Deep wells provide water for thirsty residents and busy industries. But as industry expands and population grows, aquifers drop, forcing wells deeper and deeper. Cities — especially small cities like Quincy — are being forced to find creative ways to reuse water.

Which is why the city — and Microsoft — have spent “tens of millions” on this system.

Davis said on average, Quincy uses around 2.2 billion gallons of water per year — enough water for a town of 30,000, nearly four times the size of Quincy’s current population.

Of that, more than half is used by the city’s large food processors, he said, with another third used by residential and other business customers and the remaining 10%-15% is used to cool the city’s data centers.

“The goal of the reuse system is to take that 10-15% away from potable water supply and give that back to the community for growth,” Davis said.

In addition to the QWRU, the city also has a municipal wastewater treatment system — which treats ordinary residential and business wastewater — and an industrial wastewater system, which treats the wastewater from the food processors.

According to City Administrator Pat Haley, the three systems are needed because the waste in all three water streams is very different.

Haley said that the waste in the data center water tends to be inorganic — metals and salts — the result of evaporation and concentration. Roughly three out of every five gallons used for data center cooling evaporate, leaving briny and metal-contaminated water that needs to be carefully filtered before it can be reused.

However, wastewater from the city’s food processors is very different, containing lots of organic material that can be treated with simpler technology, Haley said. In fact, Quincy is looking to find a way to reuse as much of that water as possible, given how big a portion of the city’s total water use it actually is.

“We need ecology to find a way to permit the reuse of that water so that they can, once it’s treated, run it back through the system,” Haley said. “Because it doesn’t have the loss that data center water has.”

Currently, treated wastewater from the industrial system is pumped into the West Canal — something the Bureau of Reclamation has said must end in September 2022. Currently, Quincy officials are trying to find a way to use that water to irrigate nearby farmland.

Haley said treated municipal wastewater is currently pumped into ponds where it both evaporates and percolates down the soil back into the groundwater. Haley would like to see some — or all — of that water reused in some way, either to water lawns or even as makeup water for the data centers.

It’s even clean enough to drink, he said, though most people find the idea of drinking treated wastewater … disturbing.

“Some of it is psychological,” Haley said. “No one thinks of taking water that’s right out of the municipal plant and drinking it, but really, it’s clean enough. You could. But just knowing where it came from makes you hesitate.”

Still, treated and reused water is the future — at least for watering lawns. The Othello City Council voted several years ago to create a municipal irrigation system to reuse treated water for lawns and gardens at new construction, and the city has also embarked on a project to test storing treated water from a Bureau of Reclamation canal in an underground aquifer and pumping it back out when needed, when canal water isn’t flowing.

It’s all part of the cooperation, creative thinking and financing needed to keep water flowing in the desert, according to Brook Beeler, director of the Department of Ecology’s Eastern Regional Office.

“That will help expand their supply during times of drought or when water supply changes through the years,” she said.

Because the future is about getting creative, reusing water, storing it, making sure there’s something for that not rainy day.

“It’s efficiencies and conservation, it’s how do we re-time water, store it for later, is there a way to capture it and hang on to it until you need it?” Beeler said. “We’re testing that, to show how it works.”

Because, as Haley noted, quoting a probably apocryphal statement from Mark Twain, out west “whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.”

So it’s important to use the water we have as well and as wisely as possible, Haley said.

“Don’t throw this water down the drain,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.