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South Platte Renew’s Gas Recovery and Pipeline Injection Project
SPR's biogas conditioning system is housed in the white structure to the left.
S
outh Platte Renew (SPR) is a regional wastewater facility serving approximately 300,000 people in and around the cities of Littleton and Englewood, Colorado. As part of its energy optimization activities, it recently installed a gas recovery facility that allows it to capture the methane that is created as part of the wastewater treatment process, purify it, and sell it to Xcel Energy. In addition to the money it gets from Xcel, this earns SPR significant credit from federal and state renewable fuel standard programs. In this interview, SPR Director Pieter Van Ry tells Municipal Water Leader about the genesis of the program and his advice for other utilities that are interested in a similar initiative. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Pieter Van Ry: I’ve spent 25 years in the water, wastewater, and storm water field. I have an undergraduate degree in engineering from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse and an executive MBA from the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. I began my career in engineering consulting, and after about 10 years, I made the transition to the public sector as the engineering manager of a water utility. I progressed from engineering manager to engineering director, and a little over 2 years ago, I became the director of SPR. In March 2020, I also became the director of the City of Englewood’s utilities. SPR and the utilities department are two distinct and separate organizations that are housed under the city umbrella. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about SPR.
22 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2021
Municipal Water Leader: What sort of infrastructure do you manage? Pieter Van Ry: We are a wastewater treatment facility only. Our property is about 53 acres in size, and everything inside the fence belongs to SPR. We don’t have large interceptors or anything like that. The site has about 25 buildings and approximately 50 process tanks. Our current rated capacity is 50 million gallons per day. We’re an advanced tertiary wastewater treatment facility with a liquid stream, a solid stream, and a gas stream. Our main wastewater treatment processes include primary clarification, trickling filter treatment, secondary clarification, tertiary nitrifying trickling filter treatment, denitrification filter treatment, solids handling, and disinfection. Municipal Water Leader: What was the motivation behind the creation of your gas recovery facility and pipeline injection project? Pieter Van Ry: Several decades ago, SPR developed an interest in trying to recover the methane gas stream that is created as part of the wastewater treatment process. In the 1990s, we installed two 1‑megawatt engine generators to offset electricity use and used the gas to power those generators. However, the gas was so dirty that it was not a reliable fuel source and fouled the engines. Ultimately, that project was abandoned after a significant investment. In 2012, an internal workgroup focused on energy sought to identify ways to improve energy optimization at the facility. municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF SPR.
Pieter Van Ry: SPR is a regional wastewater facility that is a 50/50 joint venture between the Cities of Englewood and Littleton. In the late 1970s, each city had its own separate wastewater treatment plant, each of which required a significant number of upgrades. The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency worked with the two cities to combine those plants into a regional facility. The regional facility serves those two cities, which have a combined population of about 80,000, as well as a number of connector sewer districts, or communities outside the two cities, bringing the total population we serve to about 300,000 people. Our service area is about 108 square miles in size.
