December 2015 Queensland Branch Newsletter

President’s Report by Matt Dawson

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Can you believe its December already? As we roll into summer, we are reminded yet again of the unique climatic challenges that we face as a sector with a strong “El Nino” bearing down on us. I hope the potential combination of heat, thunder storm activity and dry periods do not treat our sector too harshly in the coming months.

We have now wrapped up our program of events for the year with another successful QWater conference held on 11 to 13 November in Brisbane. It was great to touch base with many of the 180+ delegates and very pleasing to see a good turnout from some of our younger members. The Branch Committee was pleased that the Brisbane based mid week format was well received. A big thank you again to our trade exhibitors, sponsors and presenters who made the conference a success.

The event also incorporated our “End of Year” celebrations, including a presentation on the recent AWA Consumer Survey and our own interactive poll on the night followed by a lively discussion. Many thanks to Daniel Lambert from Arup for the presentation.

QWater wrapped up with a Queensland Urban Utilities hosted visit to the Luggage Point STP and the QUU Innovation Centre on site. The centre is truly impressive, and there is some fascinating work going on, but what really struck many of our delegates throughout the conference was the cultural commitment from QUU to the overall program. A big thanks to all the team at QUU for hosting us.

As most of you will know by now, we officially farewelled our Queensland State Manager, Sharon Ible at the end of year event, after five and a half years of passionate, committed and highly professional service. Sharon has consistently applied a unique combination of organisational skills, performance and outcomes focus with genuine

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member service and a focus on building relationships. She will be sorely missed and Im sure everyone joins me in wishing her every success for the future.

We have been very fortunate to have the support of Gail Reardon, AWA Victorian State Manager while we find Sharon’s replacement. Gail did an outstanding job of supporting us at QWater and thank you to our members for making her feel welcome.

I hope as the year draws to an end, you all have a chance to reflect on what we have achieved in the sector in 2015 and maybe even start making some plans for 2016. I hope you get the chance to have a break through the festive season, recharge the batteries and spend some well earned quality time with family and friends. I look forward to catching up with you again in 2016.

2015 Qwater Brisbane

After the keynote speaker sessions delegates attended the Business Efficiency Session of papers followed by the Innovation Showcase where trade delegates were able to provide a brief overview of any innovative products and then five additional papers discussing innovation before the “Meet the Trade Drinks” sponsored by Steelmains before adjourning to the Normanby Hotel for the Conference Dinner.

Day 2 commenced with a keynote address by Peter Dennis, the CEO of Seqwater who provided a presentation discussing community engagement and the need for water businesses to engage with the community and stakeholders to ensure that community expectations for liveable communities were met. This involved the challenge for utilities to consider extremes of climate while managing their core business and green space. Seqwater are required to manage 50% of the open space in the SE Qld region and in order to determine what investment should be made in managing recreation areas and catchment management compared to built assets conducted four community engagement “Water for Life” workshops to assist with Seqwater’s 30 year plan.

The four remaining sessions for the day featured papers discussing Water Security, Catchment Management, Water Treatment, Business Efficiency, Project Excellence and Risk.

The assessment panel after much soul searching awarded the prize for best paper to Ashley Massey of Unitywater who presented a paper entitled “Deep Gravity Sewers – Managing the Risk” on behalf of Steve Walker who was apparently running a marathon in New York. Honourable mention needs to be made of Angela Dean’s paper on fostering community engagement and Marcus Thomas’ paper on utilising a UPS system to replace a sewage pump station’s emergency generator.

Many thanks to Sandra Hall’s team for an enjoyable conference and to Gail Reardon of AWA’s Victorian Office who stepped up to help after Sharon Ible’s departure.

By: Steve Tansley

On 11th and 13h November over 180 delegates attended the QWater15 Conference in Brisbane.

This event which is usually been held either on a Friday and Saturday in more remote (and exotic locations) on the Sunshine or Gold Coasts was moved to Brisbane in an attempt to attract more delegates from the Brisbane or near Brisbane based Consultants and Utilities.

The venue was the remodeled Grand Chancellor Hotel at Spring Hill, which provided ample room for the Trade Display and a spacious conference room.

The keynote address by the Honorable Steven Miles the Queensland Minister for Environment and Heritage Protection and Minister for National Parks and the Great Barrier Reef opened the proceeding. Dr Miles touched on the issues facing the Great Barrier Reef in particular climate change and the on-going, although reducing, discharges of nutrients into the reef environment. The Queensland Government is committed to working with industry to reduce the effect of operations on the reef and although the GBR Report Card was still poor there is noticeable improvement in coral and sea grass growth.

The next keynote was by Graham Hawke, Deputy Director of Environment and Research at the Bureau of Meteorology. Graham’s address included an easy to understand explanation of the El Nino and La Nina effects on Australia’s climate and he featured BOM’s new tools to predict weather including some useful computer tools for modelling Water Storage and predicting Storm Surges. It would appear from Graham’s presentation that apart from weather forecasting BOM is an underutilised resource in the water industry.

The third opening keynote was presented by Richard Petterson the Executive Leader, Operations and Service Delivery for Queensland Urban Utilities. Richard outlined the major challenges faced by QUU as it consolidated five separate water organisations into a single efficient water business. QUU had to successfully blend the original entities with their regional influences and greatly varying cultures and mind sets into a single organisation with a common strategy, consistent operational procedures and more importantly a uniform attitude the key issue facing QUU; Safety.

2015 Qwater Brisbane

On 17 October 2015, the Second Edition of the AWA Queensland Young Water Professionals (YWP) Amazing Race took place in Brisbane.

After a really successful inaugural YWP Amazing Race in 2014, the expectations for the 2nd edition were very high. The YWP Committee established a dedicated planning group to organise the event. Elena Mejia Likosova, Alycia Moore, Thakshila Balasuriya, Alex Wise, Abraham Negaresh, Robert Goedecke and Christina Lockett donated their time and resources towards making this year’s Amazing Race even better.

Many long evenings were spent discussing communication strategies and locations and activities to keep our participants entertained. This lead to the registration of 10 teams of 4-5 people, most of them formed and sponsored by their organisation: MWH, Jacobs Group, Seqwater, Unitywater and Gold Coast Water. Likewise, the researcher/student community was well represented by a returning AWMC (UQ) team and a QUT/Griffith University students’ team. The ‘Bobbie Boucher Team’, was formed by individual registrations of professionals from Aurecon, the Department of Transport and Main Roads, GPA Engineering and Water Modelling Solutions.

On the day, the excitement could be seen on the participants’ faces and the reigning winning Seqwater team were giving defiant looks to their competitors. Maps, challenges and the never old water balloons were distributed and then the starting shout was heard out loud!

Teams were checking maps and clues, strategies were created and racing routes designed. Teams started to spread out around Brisbane CBD, Southbank and the Botanic Gardens. Many decided to improve their knowledge on water pipe materials and visited the Brisbane Museum, or decided to show off their current knowledge on a mix and match Pump challenge.

The more active ones went straight to the Botanic Gardens, where the popular Flying Sponge Duck Relay was waiting for them. In order to recover, some decided to take a short stroll to the Riverside and take a Holiday Group pic with the yachts.

Although all teams followed a different route and strategy, they all knew they were racing against the clock. At 5 pm sharp the race ended, with teams assembling at the Beach House Bar and Grill in the heart of Brisbane CBD.

While waiting for the final scores, teams networked, shared their adventures and expressed how much they enjoyed the race. All teams fought valiantly, but the clear winners were the ‘Bobbie Boucher Team’. Besides gaining custody of the perpetual trophy, the winning team received a bottle of wine and a voucher each for an upcoming AWA event of their choice.

This year’s YWP Amazing Race was without a doubt a smashing success. We would like to give a big thank-you to MWH and Yatala Pumping and Irrigation for sponsoring this great event!

By Elena Mejia Likosova

YWP The Amazing Race

Dr Sandra Hall Vice President Queensland Branch

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Sandra is the Vice President of the Queensland Branch of AWA and has made it her mission on the committee to encourage a greater involvement by University professionals and women in the association. She comes to this role having been a member since 1998. She has been very actively involved in the Association since becoming a member and apart from being on the Branch Committee was on the organising committees for Ozwater 14 and 15, the YWP organising committee for 2010 and was Chair of QWater15 just to name a few of her areas of involvement. It is worth noting that she is also actively involved in a number of other organisations including the International Water Association, the Australian Society for Microbiology and the International Society of Microbial Ecology.

Encouragingly Sandra has longer-term ambitions to put a lot more back into our association and industry, which is good for our future.

By profession Sandra is a biotechnologist having gained her Bachelor of Applied Science degree with honours from the University of Queensland in 1998. She followed this up with a doctorate from the University of Queensland entitled “The Study and Development of Microbial Quantification Methods for Use in Activated Sludge”. This was done whilst supported by the Advanced Water Management Centre (AWMC) and the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Waste Management and Pollution Control. When asked whether she has had the chance of applying this knowledge she said that technology has moved forward in leaps and bounds since then and much of what she had done has now been

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superceded. The doctorate however gave her life skills in problem-solving, critical reasoning, project management and evaluation that she has applied to all of her roles since.

Following the doctorate she continued working with the AWMC doing research into microbial loads on the roots of wheat plants. It was known that aluminium in the soil can reduce the production of wheat when in a soluble form. Sandra experimented with various wheat cultivars to identify those with the best tolerance and linked this to the microbial ecology within the root systems. But her passion was water and whilst working as the Microbial Ecology Lab Manager at the AWMC she took up a secondment position as the Education and Training Manager at the Environmental Biotechnology CRC. Realising her strengths were not in doing the research, but talking about it, Sandra took on the role of Communications officer and Event Manager with the AWMC with a brief secondment as the Event director at the International Society of Microbial Ecology in the Netherlands.

In 2011 Sandra was appointed to the position of Engagement and Business Development Manager at the AWMC. In this position she covers the portfolios of stakeholder engagement, marketing, communications, events, advancement and training. A jack of all trades not academic - “I am about to celebrate 17 years being a part of the AWMC team and I have stayed so long because of the passion and commitment shown by the team, a team that is truly making a difference.”

Then in 2015 she accepted the seconded role of Regional Executive Director of the Eastern Region (QLD, NSW and ACT) of the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities (CRCWSC). The mission of the CRCWSC is to undertake world-class interdisciplinary research and to synthesise the research outputs such that they can influence urban water management and the delivery of water sensitive Australian cities and towns.

Sandra and her husband Justin, also a UQ academic, have two children, Alex (5) and Owen (2). Their idea of a good weekend is spending time at their retreat in Toorbul where they can relax, fish and enjoy the Pumicestone Passage waterways. She says she loves watching the ecosystem of the passage recover and is particularly pleased to see the Dugongs back.

Scott Roy AWA Undergraduate Water Prize Winner

Scott Roy won the AWA Undergraduate Water Prize this year and was presented with the prize at the Gala Dinner. Some may have wondered why an “older” looking gent was eligible for this award. Well the answer is that Scott has only just completed his civil engineering course at the University of the Sunshine Coast at the ripe old age of 42. Obviously he was not idle before doing this course, initially starting out life as a plumber and gasfitter in Adelaide where he worked for twenty years before coming to Queensland.

Whilst working as a plumber and gasfitter he noted a need for a device for improving water quality associated with stormwater runoff. He then spent a number of years developing a range of products that could be used for this purpose including litter baskets, trash racks, screen filtration systems, silt arresters and grit traps. He and his wife Jodie then set up a company to manufacture and sell these products and their company “Ecosol” now sells these products throughout Australia and in New Zealand and Malaysia. Whilst no longer being actively involved in the running of the company he and his wife retain a major shareholding.

This “engineering” experience encouraged Scott to enrole in a civil engineering course at the University of the Sunshine Coast. As part of this course Scott was involved in a group discussion on some the flood inundation problems associated with the 2011 flood. Of particular interest to him were the impacts of flood inundation on underground car parking areas, basements and lift wells etc.

Being a problem solving person Scott began investigating potential solutions to the problem. This involved research, preparation of drawings and development of 3D models. His next step was to build some prototype models in his garage to test their effectiveness. With encouragement from the University, he then applied for and a received a grant to further test the prototypes at the University using larger scale models. He was also able to carry out rigorous hydraulic testing. Concurrent with his initial work in developing the prototypes, Scott set about taking up patents and establishing a new company called “Flow Defence”. This company has now been established and is seeking venture capital.

Scott joined SMEC last year on a casual basis and is now working full time at SMEC. He says he splits his time between SMEC and Flow Defence with SMEC getting the prime time access to him during the day. He is pleased to be working with a large company like SMEC and hopes to further develop his skills particularly in stormwater type projects. I asked him what he like doing in his spare time and needless to say there is no spare time as he enjoys doing what he is doing.

Scott is certainly a well-deserved winner of the Undergraduate Water Prize. It is certain that we will be hearing a lot more about Scott in the future.

Queensland Urban Utilities Innovation Program

Queensland Urban Utilities has established an Innovation Program for the purpose of delivering operational efficiencies, improved safety practices, enhanced customer outcomes and improvements to workplace culture. As part of this program an Innovation Centre has been set up at our Luggage Point Sewage Treatment Plant with the aim of developing innovative solutions and trialling emerging technology. A feature of the Innovation Centre is the strong collaboration with university researchers and industry partners.

Two projects currently being investigated are the “Affordable and Sustainable Water Technology through Optimal Technology Innovation (ASWTOTI)” project and the “Pilot Sewer System” project.

The ASWTOTI project involves research and pilot scale testing of the next generation of carbon and nitrogen removal processes for sewage treatment. Conventional sewage treatment processes focus on the removal of organics with bioenergy recovery as a secondary goal. Consequently only a small fraction of organic carbon contained in sewage is converted to bioenergy. In this project, we are testing a novel carbon removal process of an anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR), which is specifically designed to capture the organic carbon and convert it into biogas. A 2m3 pilot scale AnMBR has been set up, treating 8m3 per day of domestic sewage. Currently the reactor consistently removes 80-90 per cent of the COD from sewage, and produces more than 1m3 of biogas daily.

The second new technology being tested at the Innovation Centre is the ANAMMOX process for nitrogen removal. Whilst the ANAMMOX process has been successfully used for side stream treatment of centrate before it is returned to the main treatment stream, it has not been successfully applied for mainstream treatment. The process however offers significant advantages for carbon recovery for digestion and in energy savings for nitrogen removal. Theoretical energy savings could be up to 60 per cent, as compared to conventional treatment, although in reality 30-40 per cent could be expected. The ANAMMOX process currently has limitations on N removal, with only 15 mg/L achievable. Research is therefore focussed on reduction of the nitrogen to levels expected from well operated BNR plants (i.e. 3-5 mg/L total N). Partners for this project are the University of Queensland Advanced Water Management Centre, the Australian Water Recycling Centre of Excellence, GHD, Melbourne Water, Veolia Water Australia, the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, the Water Environment Research Foundation (US) and Brown and Caldwell.

The “Pilot Sewer System” project is still in its infancy. A pilot scale sewer system has been set up at the Innovation Centre to test the impacts on sewer systems of lower per capita flows and the consequent higher organic loads. Specifically the potential for increased corrosion and odour emanation will be investigated. The pilot scale model includes 1.2km of sewer pipes incorporating both gravity and rising mains. These have been built to replicate design standards for Queensland Urban Utilities, leading to direct relation of results. The project will run for three years.

Logan Water Infrastructure Alliance

Logan City Council has recently awarded an alliance type contract to the Logan Water Infrastructure Alliance (LoganWIA). The contract is a public and private sector enterprise involving Council and a consortium led by Downer Utilities together with partners Cardno and WSP Parsons Brinkerhoff.

The three-year alliance contract began on 1 July 2015, with a further two one-year options at Council’s discretion. The alliance team will be based in Beenleigh and it is expected that the team will fluctuate in size peaking at just over 100 people.

This new alliance contract follows on from the previous the six-year alliance program. Council elected to continue with an alliance delivery method after extensive review of delivery methods by independent advisors. The difference between this alliance and the previous alliance is the requirement to build Council’s capabilities towards self-sufficiency over the period of the contract. In addition the inclusion of infrastructure renewals and water meter replacement programs into the alliance will drive a more integrated approach to the delivery of Council’s program of work.

Preliminary estimates suggest that the alliance will deliver approximately $180m of works over a three-year period however this will be the subject of intensive review during the progress of the alliance. In the first year up to $40 million of works will be delivered. This will include a combination of capital projects and renewals projects.

Projects moving into the construction phase in late 2015/early 2016 include:

• the upgrade of aerators at Beenleigh Wastewater Treatment Plant

• Stage 2 of trunk wastewater infrastructure for the Bahrs Scrub Local Development Area

• construction of a new water reservoir to service residential development at Mundoolun

• Stage 3 of a citywide pressure and leakage management program

• water main replacement and wastewater infrastructure renewal programs throughout the city

• a citywide water meter and service replacement program

In addition to the above works, the alliance is currently managing and will continue to manage a diverse range of planning studies, investigations, and project development tasks. For example, the Planning & Investigations team is currently completing an inflow and infiltration inspection program of the Rochedale South wastewater network. This program is assessing the impacts of inflow and infiltration on the wastewater catchment during wet weather events by identifying defects and illegal connections to the wastewater network, predominately from residential connections.

The Alliance team is headed by Christian Truscott as Alliance Manager. Senior members of the Council’s engineering team are embedded into the alliance team, with Council providing three members to the ALG.

Operators Corner A two way street By Peter Griffiths

The Last Gasp-Common Failures of Waste Water Treatment Plants

What is the one common operating issue with almost every activated sludge treatment plant? Poor designs (never!), bad process engineering (surely not) or “unfavourable sewage characteristics” (seems to show up a lot after Bio P plants are built and rarely detected beforehand). Although these could be possible candidates (bad process engineering aside), they are, hopefully, not common to most activated sludge plants.

My answer is; poor dissolved oxygen monitoring!!! Dissolved oxygen monitoring is the key to both performance and energy consumption; two of the most important factors in the optimum operation of a treatment plant. Well, I hear you say, we have dissolved oxygen probes in every cell of our aeration tank and we calibrate our Dissolved Oxygen probes every fortnight so we are okay. Bet you’re not!!! Most dissolved oxygen probes are calibrated in air to give a saturation reading of about 10 mg/L. However, unless you own a power plant running on free energy, you will be operating your plant at dissolved oxygen concentrations of the order of 2 mg/L or less. So, checking that the speedo in your car is 100% accurate at 200 kph won’t help you when get a speeding ticket in a school zone because your speedo is 10 km out at 40 kph. Same with the dissolved oxygen probes. I often challenge people to get a bucket of return activated sludge (or some other guaranteed zero dissolved oxygen liquid-don’t use sodium metabisulphite solutions as this can contaminate some probes) and see what the “dissolved oxygen” reading is. I have personally seen probes give readings of 1.5 mg/L or more in a zero dissolved oxygen environment. Effectively, for a dissolved oxygen set point of say 2 mg/L, you are actually operating your plant at 0.5 mg/L!!!!

So why do we need accurate DO measurement. First off, if the measurement is “optimistic” you will probably get ammonia bleed through or spikes in the effluent. This will be compensated for by increasing the DO Set Point. So you end up chasing your tail trying to compensate for continual “drift” in the dissolved oxygen zero. What is worse is that you never really know what the best or optimum dissolved oxygen concentration set point is. So when you finally replace the probe itself or the sensor head, you don’t know what set point you should use and the whole process starts again.

Furthermore, during an energy audit, the expert consultant will confidently tell you that by reducing your dissolved oxygen concentration from the current set point of 3 mg/L to 2 mg/L you will reduce your plant power consumption by 50%. You can’t achieve this (as you are actually aerating at a “real” set point of 1.5 mg/L and going down 1 mg/L to 0.5 mg/L will cause all sorts of headaches) and you will need to answer a lot of difficult questions when you don’t realise the power savings!!!

However, I hear you say, “we use an ammonia probe on the effluent as a “watchdog” to automatically adjust the dissolved oxygen set point”. My comment; be careful when implementing this sort of feedback dissolved oxygen control. You can easily reduce the dissolved oxygen set point too far despite the dissolved oxygen “measurement” appearing satisfactory and whilst still getting reasonable ammonia results. If you go too far, then other aspects of the biomass can be impacted and this can lead to increased sludge production and poor settling solids with subsequent elevated suspended solids in the effluent amongst other things.

As a final word, make sure that your Dissolved Oxygen probes are in the correct place and giving representative readings. I have seen probes located in tanks where they effectively measure the dissolved oxygen in a stagnant pocket or in the flow from the preceding tank. Don’t assume that the design engineer has picked the best spot. I haven’t always (really!), and I now allow for a few metres of spare cable and hold back on riveting the local panel to the handrails until I am a bit more confident.

So, my recommendations on almost every plant have been;

1. Get a good DO probe with minimal drift in the zero. Do the research, check with operations staff (not engineers) as to the best ones around. I have my favourites however, like the ABC-no product placement.

2. Check that you have the probe in the right place for at least most of the time.

3. Regularly calibrate the probe at both ends of the dissolved oxygen scale. All probes eventually need replacement no matter how good they are.

4. Get a microscope and check the higher life forms in the sludge (you can easily see them with a $100 student microscope). These need dissolved oxygen to survive so they monitor your plant 24 hours a day seven days a week for free and don’t require calibration. You can actually calibrate your dissolved oxygen set points based on the higher life forms present!!

If you can’ t do these things, then, hold your breath. It won’t help, but at least you will know how the bugs feel!!!!!

Upcoming Events

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 QUU’s S1 Sewer Rehabilitation Program, Brisbane

Wed, 9 March 2016 Gold Coast Long Term Effluent Release Project, Brisbane

Wed, 13 April 2016 Validation of Treatment Technologies, Brisbane

9-13 May 2016 Ozwater 16, Melbourne

Wed, 8 June 2016 Modelling innovation and Seqwater’s Water Security Plan, Brisbane

Australian Water Association PO Box 1148, Wynnum QLD 4178 Contact Sharon Ible Telephone 07 3396 4880 Mobile 0407 585 052 Email sible@awa.asn.au

This newsletter has been compiled from information supplied; hence AWA cannot accept responsibility for the accuracy of any information so supplied or for any loss or damage, which may arise, from errors or omissions.

Thank you to all of the organisations who have sponsored and supported the AWA QLD Branch over the past year:

Editor: Rod Lehmann

We are looking for articles on your projects. Please contact Rod at rod.lehmann@bigpond.com or Sharon Ible

Our many thanks to Sharon Ible for her dedication and hard work in supporting the activities of the Association. We wish her well in her future career.

Our many thanks to Sharon Ible for her dedication and hard work in supporting the activities of the Association. We wish her well in her future career.