Padre Dam Municipal Water District (USA) opened its Advanced Water Purification Demonstration Facility in late April of this year. The demonstration facility will use advanced water purification technologies to purify and test approximately 100,000 gallons of recycled water each day.
The facility was designed to deal with California’s severe drought conditions by developing a new local water supply. The full scale system would have the potential to provide a water source that is up to 20 percent of Padre Dam’s current drinking water supply.
The new process has four treatment steps – free chlorine disinfection, membrane filtration, reverse osmosis and advanced oxidation (ultra violet light and hydrogen peroxide). Advanced oxidation is capable of killing difficult to eradicate pathogens and removing micro pollutants other processes can not treat.
If successful, the treated water would be injected into the ground water basin to be withdrawn at a later time for treatment prior to distribution as drinking water. Additionally, Padre Dam will study the possibility of expanding Padre Dam’s proposed Advanced Water Purification Project to accommodate and treat wastewater from the other agencies’ service areas in order to provide additional water supplies. This expanded program could produce up to 10 million gallons of water per day.