CADMUS GROUP

10/20/04

"The Arsenic Rule"

Tami: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to today's seminar on "The Arsenic
Rule," powered by Encounter Web conferencing. Before we begin today's
seminar, I would like to review a few housekeeping items. First of all,
if you haven't clicked on the meeting URL link provided to you in your
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At this time, I'd like to introduce our moderator for today, Andrea
Matzke from EPA's Protection Branch in the Office of Groundwater and
Drinking Water. Andrea, you have the floor.

Andrea: Thanks, Tami. I'd like to welcome everyone to the first of two
Web cast trainings on the Arsenic Rule. Today's training will focus on
treatment technologies. As Tami mentioned, I'm Andrea Matzke and I work
on Arsenic and Radionuclide Rules implementation in the Office of
Groundwater and Drinking Water's Drinking Water Protection Division here
in Washington, D.C. Today we have six presentations on treatment
technology issues, including a panel discussion on two small systems
that were included in Round 1 of the Arsenic Demonstration Projects. We
did have requests in the past to include photos of presenters, so here
we all are at popular request.

I would like to leave a minute at the end of each presentation to answer
any questions that come in from the audience. We'll also have 10 minutes
at the end of the Web cast to address questions targeted toward all the
presenters. As before in earlier Web casts, we will provide written
documentation of all the questions that were answered, as well as some
of the questions that could not be addressed during the Web cast. We do
appreciate your patience in allowing some time before this question and
answer list is posted onto our Drinking Water Academy Web site. It does
take some time. And actually, those who viewed the radionuclide Web cast
several months ago, that question and answer document is up on our Web
site now. We'll also be recording this session and post both the written
and audio files on the same Web site.

So with that, I'd like to introduce our first speaker. He's Tom Sorg and
Tom is a research engineer for the Water Supply and Water Resources
Division in the Office of Research and Development at EPA in Cincinnati.
He has a B.S. and M.S. in civil environmental engineering from the
University of Notre Dame and he's a registered P.E. in the State of
Ohio. Tom has over 40 years of experience with environmental programs
for the federal government and has spent the last 31 years with the
Drinking Water Research and Development Program of EPA. For 25 years,
Tom has been chief of the Inorganics and Particulate Control Branch of
the Drinking Water Research Division. His special emphasis of research
work has been on drinking water treatment technology for the removal of
inorganic and radionuclide contaminants from water supplies, including
the removal of arsenic. During the past 5 years, his research has
focused on treatment technologies to remove arsenic from drinking water
in support of the revised arsenic MCL of 10 µg/L. This effort has
included the responsibility for the arsenic removal full-scale
demonstration program. Tom has authored over sixty publications on
drinking water treatment and is a member of AWWAMAAEE. So, with that,
Tom, are you set to go?

Tom: Let's go. Good afternoon everyone. The section on treatment options
is going to be broken down into two parts. I'm going to take about 20
minutes to cover the first part and then Darren Lytle, one of my
coworkers here, will be covering the second part. In my first part, I'm
going to talk briefly about arsenic chemistry and then a few words about
best available technology and then finish up with adsorptive media
technology. Regarding the arsenic chemistry, if you recall from your
Chemistry 101, arsenic is a cation with a charge of +3 and +5, but in
water it reacts with water and forms various species. The ones I've
highlighted here in bold for Arsenic (III) occurs in the general pH
range of 6.5 to 8.5, which is the common pH range for groundwater. For
Arsenic (V), there are two species, both shown here on the slide. The
key difference with Arsenic (III) is that the species for Arsenic (III)
has no charge. For Arsenic (V), of the two species, one has a --1 and
the second one a --2.

Now you might ask: "what's the significance of the arsenic speciation?"
Well, the important part is that Arsenic (V) is more effectively removed
than Arsenic (III) by most of the treatment technologies that we're
using for arsenic removal. Therefore, to achieve maximum removal, you
want to oxidize Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V) before applying treatment.

Now you might ask: "how do you oxidize Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V)?"
Well, there are a number of ways. First there are three chemical
oxidants that are very effective; free chlorine, potassium permanganate,
and ozone. There are some solid oxidizing medias on the market that go
under the trade names of Pyrolox and Filox - these are solid materials.
They're basically a manganese dioxide and they can also oxidize Arsenic
(III). Chloramines, chlorine dioxide, and UV radiation are not
effective. The question always comes up about aeration. Will aeration
oxidize Arsenic (III) as it does Iron (II) to Iron (III)? And the answer
is no. It's very, very, slow and it's not effective.

To move onto BAT technology, when the Arsenic Rule came out, the Agency
listed seven different technologies under best available technology. To
make the list, you have to achieve seven different criteria. I've listed
only one here in the right hand column and that has to deal with percent
removal and the criteria is it has to have a high percent removal,
generally 80% or more. And these seven technologies can achieve 80% or
more removal with Arsenic (V). So the BAT is based upon arsenic being in
the Arsenic (V) form. The arsenic technologies listed are ion exchange,
activated alumina, reverse osmosis, and so on down the line to the very
last one where it says oxidation/ filtration with an iron to arsenic
ratio of 20 to 1. This last one really refers to iron removal processes
and this would be used when you have rather high iron in your water and
it's effective when the ratio of iron to arsenic is 20 to 1.

The Rule also discusses several other groundwater processes; two of them
that were mentioned in the Rule are coagulation-assisted microfiltration
and GFH. Coagulation-assisted microfiltration is effective, but there
was no full-scale history to allow it to be listed as BAT. Another one
that was discussed was GFH, which is a granular ferric hydroxide
adsorption media. This did not make the list because at that time there
was a lack of published data. But we know both of these technologies are
fairly effective. For small systems, compliance for centralized
treatment - it's the same as the initial list, but it also includes
point-of-use reverse osmosis, activated alumina and for point-of-entry
activated alumina.

Now, a very frequently asked question, at least to me, is: "what would
be the first thing you would want to consider when beginning to decide
on an arsenic removal technology?" And my response, which is my opinion,
is that the first thing you want to examine is the level of arsenic in
your source water. Iron is an excellent adsorptive media for arsenic and
whether it be an iron media, an iron floc from an iron coagulant, or the
natural precipitated iron. Therefore, if the natural iron content of
your source water is high - particularly if it's above 0.03 mg/L - then
you should take advantage of it and consider it as probably one of your
first options for arsenic removal.

I put together this little process guide, which to me is a very simple
guide, and it relates arsenic to iron. And if you look on the left hand
side, it shows arsenic and then on the bottom of the curve is iron. The
graph is broken up into a couple of different areas. The key part is the
iron MCL, 0.03 mg/L. If you're above 0.03 mg/L in iron, you probably
want to consider arsenic removal by removing the iron. If you remove the
iron you will remove the arsenic.

I've broken this up into two parts: an A and a B. If you fall into the A
region, that means that you probably have enough iron in your natural
water that once you precipitate it, you will remove the arsenic. If
you're in Section B, that means you have some iron but probably not
enough to reduce the arsenic to below 10 µg/L. Darren will be discussing
the iron removal technology related to Sections A and B. Now if you have
very low iron, which would put you in the C area, you then have to begin
to look at other technologies such as media adsorption - maybe ion
exchange or even one of the membrane processes.

I'm going to move on in the last few minutes that I have to talk about
adsorptive media. The reason we selected to talk about that today is
that it is one of the processes that many of the small communities are
selecting to remove their arsenic. For example, in our Arsenic
Demonstration Program in Round 1, we have twelve sites and nine of those
twelve sites have opted to use the adsorptive media process. So it is
one that is being frequently considered and being used by many small
systems. I put on a 2-day workshop about 3 or 4 weeks ago here in
Cincinnati on the design and operation of the adsorptive media process
for arsenic removal and in my few minutes here, I'm going to try to
cover the 2-day workshop in about 10 minutes. So you're going to get
just some of the highlights.

First of all, what are some of the advantages of the adsorptive media
process? First, it's very simple. It's a fixed bed process. The capacity
for most medias is rather high. Waste products are generally not
hazardous and can be disposed of in a normal landfill and relative to
other technologies, it's low cost. There are certainly some
disadvantages. The removal capacity with most materials is impacted by
water chemistry such as pH. The lower the pH, generally the higher the
removal capacity and it may well be that you may have to adjust pH to
make the process economical and, of course, you have to replace the
media, which is an expense and takes a little bit of time.

As far as the adsorptive media design factors, there are a number of
them that you need to consider when you're designing the process. I
pulled out two, which I consider probably the key ones. One is the
selection of the media and the second one is the bed configuration. This
next slide shows a list of the adsorptive medias that have been
published by NSF under Standard 61. Now I pulled this out a couple of
years ago and I know there are more medias that have been listed under
Standard 61 since I put together this list. One of them is titanium
dioxide media by Hydroglobe and I just mention that to show that there
are different base materials, but if you look at this list, most of them
are either aluminum-based or iron-based. There are some products -
[zirconium]{.mark} as I said, titanium dioxide. So there is a wide
variety of products on the market and they have different names because
they're produced by different companies.

The medias have different capabilities and different capacities. This
slide here (Figure 1) just shows the results of a pilot study that we
completed here at a site in Ohio. I brought this in just to show you
that there are differences between performance among the different
medias. As you will see in this slide, two of the medias have
outperformed the rest of them. One is the GFH and the other one is the
E33. This information was developed from pilot plant studies. There's a
lot of research going on using laboratory studies and of course, the
manufacturers with time will have more and more information on how these
product perform under varying water and characteristics. The question
always comes up about whether you need to conduct pilot studies in all
cases. I think the manufacturers are gathering more and more data where
they're able to make fairly good predictions based upon water qualities.

This slide here shows the system that we used to do our pilot work at
the site in Ohio. So it may well be in some circumstances you may feel
it necessary to do some pilot work. Now as far as bed configuration,
there are two fundamental designs. One is putting the beds in parallel
and the second way is to use them in series. The simplest, of course, is
beds in series, either one bed, maybe a two bed or a three bed and these
can be expanded to add additional vessels if you decide to expand your
water supply. In this case, the media comes into the bed and it's
removed. The media must be replaced, however, when you are either close
to or at the MCL of 10 µg/L. It's the simplest of the two bed designs.
The other possibility - and this is a more conservative design - are two
beds in series. In this case, you will have the first bed, which is used
as a roughing filter and then this is followed by a second bed, which we
call the polishing filter. As I said, this is a more conservative
design.

This next slide just shows you a sample of a system in New Hampshire.
It's similar to the slide before that where you have four tanks, with
two tanks in series and two sets of them. Now this is the results of
monitoring that set of vessels. The thing I want to point out here in
this slide is that you're capable of using the total capacity of the
roughing filter. In this slide here, the raw water arsenic concentration
was around 60 µg/L. We monitored the arsenic coming out of the roughing
tanks and also out of the polishing tanks. In this case, because you
have a set in series, you can allow the arsenic to continue to be
removed past breakthrough in the roughing filters - so you can use the
full capacity. So in this case (at the bottom of the slide) it's
reported in weeks.

At the end of about 40 weeks the arsenic in the effluent from the
roughing filter was approaching the influent and at that time they then
changed out the filter. When you do this, you need to then replace the
two roughing filter columns (or the media in the two roughing filter
vessels) with virgin media and when you do that, you then reverse their
positions. You move the polishing filter into the first position and
then put the new material into the second position and this gives you a
little factor of safety because of breakthrough from the roughing
filter.

Now I'm close to my time and I know questions have come up about the
cost of the adsorption media systems. This is data that we put together
from our Demonstration Program Round 1. All nine of these systems are
currently in place and this gives you some of the cost information. As
you can see, we have three of the systems in series design and the rest
of them in parallel. I've included the total capital investment costs
and that includes the equipment, the installation, and all the
engineering, and then for your interest, I've included the equipment
costs. For the most part, as you increase the size of the system, as you
would expect, the cost will go up. You have to look very carefully at
how these numbers were put together because each system is slightly
different and some systems have more monitoring equipment associated
with them. Some systems have pH adjustments, some do not. Some have
holding tanks for recycle of the backwash water and this can account for
some of the higher cost in some of the systems that you would expect to
be much lower. I've included the percent of equipment cost as part of
the total investment cost. So this information just gives you some rough
cost information. With this, I'm going to conclude my remarks and we may
have time for maybe one question or two.

Andrea: Thanks, Tom. I don't think we had any questions that came in. So
we could go on, but actually I just wanted to take this opportunity to
remind people that we did upload various documents on implementation for
the Arsenic Rule as well as various design manuals that Tom's office has
produced. So when you registered, I think you saw a whole bunch of
documents. I think there's some really good ones there if you hadn't had
a chance to check them out. There's also one, the design manual for
small systems, and there's a companion piece with the decision trees
that basically is an interactive program for the design manual that,
again, if you haven't had a chance to check that out, it might be worth
doing so.

Tami: And Andrea, this is Tami, I did want to let people know as well,
to find those they can retrieve them on the page that they entered in
on. So if they just go back to that page that they clicked on the Join
Now button, they're all there and they're ready to download.

Andrea: Great, thanks, Tami, and again if you're not able to download at
that point, you can always go to our Web site or to the ORD's Web site,
the Office of Research and Development's Web site as well.

Tom: Andrea, if I can add, we do have hardbound copies of all the
reports for people who may want a hardbound copy.

Andrea: Okay, great. Looks like we did get a question that came in. Are
potential costs included in downloadable documents? I don't know Tom,
are there any costs associated with those documents?

Tom: No.

Andrea: Ok. That answers your question. Well thanks Tom, I think we'll
go on to our next speaker, Darren Lytle who will continue the treatment
technology talk. Darren received his B.S. in civil engineering from the
University of Akron in 1990. In 1991, he received an M.S. in
environmental engineering from the University of Cincinnati and he is in
the process of completing a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in
environmental engineering. Darren was hired on by the EPA in 1991 as an
environmental engineer with the Drinking Water Research Group. Over the
years he has conducted drinking water research in the areas of lead and
copper, corrosion control, filtration, iron control, and most recently
arsenic removal. With that, Darren, are you all set to go?

Darren: Ready. Thank you. As mentioned by Tom earlier, I'm going to
speak about arsenic removal during iron removal. As has already sort of
been mentioned by Tom, the adsorptive properties of iron minerals toward
arsenic are well known and as a result, many of the arsenic treatment
processes that are out there such as coagulation with an iron coagulant
and iron based adsorption media as Tom talked about, and of course iron
removal, are based on iron surfaces and the importance of those iron
surfaces in arsenic removal. I'm not going to go over this anymore and
Tom already put this graph up but the point is that we're talking about
here in cases of iron removal, you have to have a sufficient amount of
iron in the water to remove the arsenic. And, again, this is the thought
of iron versus arsenic and we're talking about here in Region A and
possibly Region B where we're going to apply iron removal during arsenic
removal. And, again, that plot shows that diagonal line going across at
a ratio of 20 to 1, which simply means 1 mg/L of iron is expected to
achieve removal of 50 µg/L of arsenic and, again, that's under ideal or
optimized conditions and that's also considering that the arsenic is in
the Arsenic (V) form.

So we're going to briefly go over iron removal and how arsenic removal
takes place during iron removal and this also applies to manganese
removal as well for those of you who may not be aware. In the case of
iron removal, the first step involves oxidation. Oxidation could be
oxidation through aeration, chlorine addition, or maybe potassium
permanganate addition. The next stage then typically involves some sort
of contact basin and what happens in the contact basin is depending on
the oxidant. Oxidation may take place and the iron particles develop and
form. Also during this stage, the adsorption of arsenic onto the iron
particles takes place and then finally the contact basin is typically
followed by filtration of some sort. It might be a green sand filter, it
might be a sand filter or some other sort of media based filter system.

Now with regards to iron removal and arsenic removal, what happens to
the species through the process? And typically (at least in the
Midwest), iron's coming up out of a well as Iron (II)^+^ and arsenic is
typically coming up as Arsenic (III). During the oxidation step,
depending on what type of oxidant is used, typically we'll add our
oxidant in the form of aeration or oxygen, chlorine, or potassium
permanganate. The iron at this point, depending on how fast the
oxidation takes place, will be converted from the ferrous form to the
insoluble ferric form or the particulate form, and again, depending on
what oxidant, Arsenic (III) is going to be converted possibly to Arsenic
(V).

Then during the contact basin step of the process - again, oxidation,
particle development, and arsenic adsorption are taking place here and
what we have now is an Iron (III) particle with some arsenic adsorbed to
it, possibly Arsenic (III) or Arsenic (V) depending on what type of
oxidant was used in the step before. Then whatever arsenic is not
adsorbed is what we refer to as soluble arsenic and that may be also in
the water as well depending on how much iron we have in the water.

Finally then we have the filtration step and the idea here is that we
just physically filter the iron and arsenic particles out of the water,
that soluble arsenic then is expected to go through the filter, and that
will be the residual arsenic that comes out and enters your distribution
system. Okay, so now what I want to do is kind of go into some case
studies - some field work that we've been involved with here in
Cincinnati - to specifically address or examine some of the factors that
impact arsenic removal during iron removal and in particular then
looking at ways or achieving ways that we can optimize arsenic removal
during iron removal with the process that we currently have or one that
we may be developing or are in the process of putting together.

The first is a form of arsenic (Tom has already really hit on this) and
we can have two possible oxidation states of arsenic -- that would be
Arsenic (III) and Arsenic (V). Arsenic (III) is removed during iron
removal with iron based processes, but it's just not removed nearly as
well as Arsenic (V). So depending on how much iron you have in the
water, you could get some removal. Aeration, again, will oxidize Iron
(II) to Iron (III) and will get you those iron particle surfaces that
you need to have to adsorb the arsenic, but again as Tom mentioned, it
will not convert Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V).

So, here's a case study where a system is using aeration alone. No
additional oxidant, so they're not converting Arsenic (III) to Arsenic
(V) yet they're able to achieve decent or really good arsenic removals.
Basically the system involves a groundwater system here in Ohio that has
2.7 mg/L of ferrous iron starting out in their well. The arsenic level
is 0.043 mg/L or 43 µg/L, 80% of which is Arsenic (III). Oxidation
simply involves aeration. At that stage, the arsenic again after
aeration is still Arsenic (III) and I also wanted to make a note here
that ammonia in the water is quite high - it's over 1 mg/L per liter of
ammonia. There's no contact basin whatsoever in this system. It goes
straight to their filters, which is a sand based material. Again, all
the arsenic is in the Arsenic (III) form and again now we have these
Iron (III) particles with the arsenic attached to them. As the water
comes out of the filters, the arsenic has been reduced down to 8 µg/L so
it's able to achieve the MCL of 10 µg/L without having to add an oxidant
to convert Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V). So no addition of permanganate
or no addition of chlorine is necessary in this particular system. As a
side note though, there is an interesting aspect of this in that the
ammonia coming out of that filter is non-detectable and we're beginning
to think perhaps that nitrification is taking place within the filter,
but I guess the question becomes: Are those nitrifying bacteria capable
of converting Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V) because those Arsenic (III)
removals are quite good? So I guess it's an area of research that we're
currently getting involved with. But nonetheless, the point is that they
didn't have to add chlorine or permanganate or some other strong oxidant
in this system.

Okay, in most cases, we are going to have to convert Arsenic (III) to
Arsenic (V) to get the ideal or optimum removal of arsenic from the
system during iron removal and, again, something hit on earlier: free
chlorine, potassium permanganate, ozone, and some of these solid
oxidizing materials (the manganese dioxide materials) are capable of
converting Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V). Chloramine, chlorine dioxide,
UV radiation and of course, oxygen are not going to do the job for you.
So when considering what type of oxidant you're going to use, again it
depends on the arsenic and do you need to have it the form of Arsenic
(V)? Again, manganese, like iron in many cases here in Ohio for example,
is typically in the water as well and manganese is not going to be
converted to a particulate form with aeration alone. You're going to
need a stronger oxidant just like arsenic. I listed some of the pros and
cons of each.

For example, in the case of aeration, if you are able to get by with
aeration alone and do not have to convert Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V),
you may need a contact basin from the standpoint that oxidation of
ferrous iron to ferric iron sometimes takes time. It could take 20
minutes to an hour depending on the water chemistry. In particular, the
pH is particularly important when it comes to oxidation rates of ferrous
iron to the particulate ferric form. Again, if we have to address
arsenic and manganese, you won't do that with oxidation by aeration.
Iron particles, we've found, form from aeration or from the fact that
oxygen is oxidizing ferrous iron or ferric iron, have less surface area.
They have less of a tendency or less ability or capacity to remove
arsenic and we'll see some data later on that shows that.

On the other hand, we found that, iron particles that are formed as a
result of oxygen oxidizing ferrous iron to ferric iron will allow you to
have longer filter run times due to the density of the particles. They
tend to be a denser particle then a particle formed as a result of
chlorination or another strong oxidant. In terms of the strong oxidants
like chlorine permanganate, again, these will address the manganese
oxidation issues, however, we found from experiments that you run into
shorter filter run times. You have to backwash more frequently as a
result of using those oxidants because the nature of the particles
changes. The iron particles - their nature, their density changes. But,
on the other hand, you tend to get and you tend to find that those
particles have more surface area and as a result of having more surface
area, you're able to remove more arsenic. You have a greater capacity to
remove arsenic. Of course, if you have an existing system where
oxidation is aeration and you need to add chlorine or permanganate, some
of those chemicals are difficult to deal with. You might have safety
issues and things like that to consider and probably you won't need a
contactor because oxidation with chlorine and permanganate and strong
oxidants is rapid, both for iron as well as the manganese and in
particular the arsenic. These are very rapid reactions.

Okay, I want to jump into now the importance of oxidation and a case
study here in Ohio, a second study where in this case, arsenic levels
are between 69 and 132 µg/L, 85% of which is in the form of Arsenic
(III) to start. We have iron at 0.5 to 1.4 mg/L and you can see we also
have some manganese in the water and then the pH is approximately 7.9.
In this case, what we did is some jar testing and what I'm showing here
is the arsenic concentration of the filtered water. That is, the iron
particles are formed, the arsenic adsorbs to those particles during the
jar test, and we filter those particles out with the arsenic attached to
them. So, I've got arsenic plotted on the Y axis versus a dose of
chlorine or potassium permanganate on the X axis. The red line here
represents the initial arsenic levels of the jars before we start the
test and you can see that they're all around 60 to 70 µg/L and what we
find in a case where we don't add an oxidant - a strong oxidant in
chlorine and potassium permanganate (so in other words, the only oxidant
present is oxygen) - we get very low reductions in arsenic: only about
10 µg/L. And again here why we get such low reductions is because again
the surface area of those particles is lower, but more importantly, the
arsenic is still in the Arsenic (III) form and again we don't get very
good removal with Arsenic (III).

But what you can see with both oxidants is that if you increase the
dosage of the oxidant, you increase your ability to take that arsenic
out until you get to about 2 mg/L or so of both oxidants and at that
point, you've got enough oxidant in there that you can oxidize all the
Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V) and you can oxidize all the iron from
ferrous iron to ferric and all the manganese. You basically met all your
demand of oxidant in a case when you hit about 2 mg/L of chlorine or
potassium permanganate. So that's an important point - that even if you
are trying to oxidize the iron and arsenic with these stronger oxidants,
you need to make sure that you have a sufficient amount or you have the
residual of the oxidant at the end of the process to get your optimum
arsenic removal.

Now, another interesting aspect of this jar test (and then I'll hit on
this again in a minute) is that we took the case of the jar where we add
oxygen as the oxidant and we oxidize all the iron to iron particles and
we didn't get very good removal of the arsenic because the arsenic was
still in the Arsenic (III) form so we decided to add chlorine now. So
the particles are already formed, so the only thing the chlorine is
doing at this point is converting Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V) and I
guess the kind of interesting thing was that as a result of doing that,
the improvement of arsenic removal only went from 0.1 to 0.2. In other
words, we only achieved another 10 to 15 µg/L of additional arsenic
removal.

So, I guess the point here (and I'll hit this again in a minute) is that
when you add a strong oxidant, if you have oxidation by aeration already
in place, you need to oxidize the iron and the arsenic with a strong
oxidant at the same time. If you have the particles already present, and
then you oxidize the arsenic later, you're not going to get very much
improvement. So you got to move your point of chlorination up earlier
before aeration. Again, I'll hit this in a minute.

Here, this is just another example of showing some of the same things
that we've already seen. This is some jar tests, this is some batch
reactor scale stuff that we've done here in the lab showing a couple of
things. The first plot at the top here is showing, basically what I have
on the Y axis is filtered arsenic. Again, it's filtered arsenic levels
after the iron particles have formed and the arsenic is adsorbed to
those particles so it's the soluble arsenic levels versus the contact
times in this particular batch scale test. In the first blue plot on the
top, we start out with a 100 µg/L of arsenic as Arsenic (V) and what
we've done here is we've free formed the particles. That is, we've taken
ferrous iron, oxidized it with oxygen, formed the particles, and then
added the arsenic. So we've got the particles present, they've been
formed, we have the Arsenic (V) and we find that interestingly enough,
we get really no removal of arsenic as a result of that. So that just
kind of reiterates the previous slide that I showed you that after
you've already formed the particles, it's almost too late. You can't
oxidize Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V) because the particles, the surfaces
just don't absorb very much arsenic.

The plot below it - the red squares below it - is basically showing the
same experiment, but this time we formed our iron particles with
chlorine. So we took ferrous iron, added some chlorine, we formed iron
particles, then once the particles were all formed, we added our arsenic
as Arsenic (V). And, interestingly here, we saw some removal, and it
took time, but after about 20 minutes or so we were kind of at optimized
with respect to Arsenic (V) removal. We did not get very good removal,
only about 40% but nonetheless, it was better than the case of the iron
particles formed from aeration -from air. So the point is that the
particles are different. Particles forming from oxygen versus particles
formed from chlorine have different properties - certainly different
adsorption capacity properties with respect to arsenic.

The bottom two plot -- the circles - represent the case where the
arsenic was present prior to, well at the same time that the arsenic was
present, so in other words, arsenic was added. We then added our iron
particles or formed our iron particles in the presence of the arsenic.
The blue circles represent the case where oxygen is the oxidant and you
can see that when oxygen is the oxidant, you're able to get pretty good
removals. Removals dramatically increase. You get about 60% removal of
arsenic, and contact time did not seem to make a difference, whereas
where the particles are formed from chlorine (which are the red circles
down below), the chlorinated particles have a greater tendency to take
out the arsenic and you're able to get down to 20 µg/L of arsenic. So
about 80% removal as a result of the different types of particles you
form from chlorine and oxygen.

Finally, the next example is a case study in Michigan. Again, just kind
of reiterating some of the things we've already talked about. This is a
study that Tom was involved with that had initially, 19 to 24 µg/L of
arsenic, again, dominantly in the initial state of Arsenic (III) - 95%
of it. Iron levels were at 0.5 to 0.6 mg/L. Initially the system was set
up so that they had an aeration tower with a 20 minute contact time
followed by 20 minute contact time then followed up by some pressure
filters and then they chlorinated. In this mode, the system basically
found that they were able to achieve 50% removal of arsenic. So they're
taking all the iron out by converting the iron from ferrous to ferric,
filtering it out in their filters, and the amount of arsenic in the form
of Arsenic (III) because it's not being converted, here was about 50%
removal. So the thinking was we needed to convert that Arsenic (III) to
Arsenic (V) and we'll get better removal. So what they did was they
moved the point of chlorination up before the filters. So now they've
already formed the iron particles through aeration so the water goes
through the aerator, the ferrous iron is converted to particles. At that
point though, the arsenic is still in the Arsenic (III) form and now
you've preformed those particles. They then decide they'll add chlorine
at that point and they convert the Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V), but as
we already talked about, since the particles were already preformed, we
don't see much additional removal and, in fact, the utility did not see
much removal at all. In fact, the removal didn't change. It was still
50% at the end of the filters as a result of moving the point of
chlorination up ahead of the filters. So the next step was to move the
point of chlorination before aeration. So let's go ahead and let's
oxidize the ferrous iron and the Arsenic (III) to Arsenic (V), and
ferric iron before aeration. At the same time, like I said before, and
as a result of that, they were able to optimize the arsenic removal and
improve removal to 75% and as a result of that, they were able to
achieve the MCL.

Lastly, what I want to do is just show that we've been doing some
additional work with our pilot plant system and this is just showing the
rapid mixer, the flocculation, the sedimentation aspects of our
filtration system and the point here is, again, to simulate iron
removal. Here's our filters and they're dual media anthracite over sand
filters and I did want to show you just some preliminary screening data
from these runs. We run this pilot plant system at a pH of 7.2 and 1.5
mg/L of iron, run them for several days, and what I'm showing here is
just several different runs. Here we include a flocculation basin where
we say yes, in other words, that's a contact time contact basin, so
whether or not we need contactor, the chlorine, whether or not we're
using chlorine or oxygen as the oxidant, whether or not we're using
Arsenic (V) or Arsenic (III).

And I guess some of the points here that I just want to make and I guess
reiterate the first two data points here that there's the 7 versus the
13 removal. This shows the difference between whether or not you're
using chlorine as the oxidant or just oxygen alone and, again, you can
get to lower levels if you're using chlorine is what's that showing (the
7 being lower). The second set of data (8/14 and 8/18 dates) is
basically showing that we don't have a contactor in place in either one
of those runs. We're going straight to the filters. As a result, at
least in the case of chlorine, there is no difference. In other words,
the contactor does not make a difference. You still get down to 7 µg/L.
However, we did observe when oxygen was the oxidant, no chlorine was
present. We did not get down to very low levels and that's in part
because you need the contact time to convert ferrous iron to ferric
iron, so we did not convert all the iron over to particulate form. The
next two (8/19 and 8/20) just demonstrate that if you add the arsenic
after iron particles are formed, again, you don't get as good as a
removal. You can only achieve down to 85 and 48 µg/L. And the final two
dates just demonstrate that Arsenic (III) is not removed if we compare
those to 8/12 and 8/13 - they're not removed as well as Arsenic (V).

And then the final point I guess I want to make there is that we had
differences in headloss buildup in the filters and we had chlorinated
particles going on to the filters - headloss buildup was much greater in
the case here, as in the case if we had oxygen as the oxidant. And then
finally, just some things that we can do to improve the process. We can
increase our iron concentration by adding iron to improve the arsenic
removal. We can adjust the pH. Arsenic removal's better at lower pH. We
can replace some media with adsorption media that would give us some
additional benefit and then, as I've demonstrated, change the point of
oxidant addition. And then to wrap things up, iron removal equals
arsenic removal. Arsenic speciation is important. As I demonstrated,
oxidant type is important. The point of oxidant application is
important. It impacts both arsenic removal as well as the plant
operation and with that, that's the completion of my presentation.

Andrea: Great, thanks very much, Darren. We actually did get a few
questions that came in but I think just for the sake of time - we're
running just a little bit late - that maybe we can answer them at the
end of the Web cast in the last 10 minutes, and if we're not able to do
that, then we'll be able to get back to everyone in a written question
and answer document that will be coming forth. So I think with that,
we're going to go ahead and introduce Abraham Chen and he's going to be
giving us an update on the demonstration projects. Now, Dr. Chen is the
deputy department manager of the Environmental Restoration Department at
Battelle in Columbus, Ohio. He has a Ph.D. degree in environmental
science and civil engineering from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. Since 1997, Abe and his staff at Battelle have
provided arsenic research support to the EPA including the Arsenic
Removal Technology Demonstration Program under EPA's Arsenic Rule
Implementation Research Program. So with that, Abe, are you all set?

Abe: Hello, everyone. I'd just like to give a status update on EPA's
Arsenic Removal Technology Demonstration Program. My co-presenter is
Lili Wang. Just to bring up one timeline here, which is October 31^st^,
2001, when the EPA Administrator announced the arsenic final standard as
10 µg/L and the pledge to provide \$20 million for R&D of more
cost-effective technologies and technical assistance and training to
operators of small treatment systems. And with this one here, we all
know that this is the Arsenic Rule Implementation Research Program. Then
under the EPA's arsenic removal technology demonstration, there are two
rounds. For Round 1 there are twelve sites involved, for Round 2 there
are 31 sites. Then for all the demonstrations, we are looking at full
scale then also we are looking at long-term demonstration. Then we are
focused on the commercially ready technologies and engineering
approaches. Then the goal of the demonstration is to determine and
document the construction costs and the operation costs of the new
system or the modification of the existing systems to achieve the
compliance of the 10 µg/L.

In the meantime, we are looking at the new systems process modification
of existing treatment for 1 year. Then in the meantime, we are looking
for operational and maintenance requirements of the treatment system.
Then we look at the characterization of the residuals produced by the
process and finally we'll also look at the impact of the treatment
process on the distribution system. As EPA looks into the selection of
the sites and the technologies using a set of criteria for the site,
including location, arsenic level, system size, and water quality, EPA
prequalified seventeen sites eventually narrowing it down to twelve
sites for demonstration under Round 1. Then for the technologies, EPA
went ahead to solicit a technical proposal. Then for Round 1, EPA
receive 70 proposals and eventually selected twelve systems for the
twelve sites. For Round 2, EPA received 148 proposals and currently we
are still in the process of working with EPA in terms of working with
the states and the different facilities trying to finalize the selection
of the technologies for Round 2.

Then the major activities involved for both Rounds 1 and 2 are
demonstration. To begin with, we sit down with all these stakeholders,
including EPA, state drinking water officials, facilities, vendors, and
engineering firms to come up with and define the roles and
responsibilities. Then with that, then we issue a letter of
understanding to all the stakeholders. Then after that we go ahead and
prepare a study plan. Then we established contracts with respective
vendors. Then working with the vendors and the facilities, we work with
the state to obtain required permits. Then after the system is installed
and being professionally shaked down then we go ahead and have 1-year
sampling for the demonstration. For the sampling, we do weekly sampling
and monthly speciation and we trained the system operators to collect
all the samples for us so that the samples may be shipped back to
Columbus to Battelle's headquarters here for the analyses. Then with
that we also prepare progress reports for EPA and prepare reports for
the other purposes and finally come out with the 6 month report and the
1-year final report.

The next slide here shows the states that got involved. Essentially here
we got twelve sites in nine states. For New Hampshire, New Mexico, and
Arizona, we have two sites each for each state. Otherwise the rest of
the states here have just one site each. This is for Round 1. Then for
nine states, each state will have one to two sites and then all of these
are the community water systems. We do not have any non-transient,
non-community water systems for Round 1. Then for the multi-component
sites, we have only one, which involves arsenic and nitrate. For the
size of the system, it ranges from 37 to 640 gallons per minute. Then
for the technology selected for Round 1, the adsorptive media systems
there are nine sites involving four adsorption media. That's E33, GFH,
G2, and AAFS. Then we have one location using ion exchange to remove
both arsenic and nitrate. Then we have one location involved with iron
removal using Kinetico's Macrolite process. Then finally we have one
location that just has the system modification.

Then the next slide here is a summary of all the sites including the
ones listed here and also in the third column here are the technologies
tested and also the vendors. And it's interesting to note that for
arsenic concentrations for instance now ranging from 14 to 146 µg/L, for
some of the states in the east and also in the Great Lakes area, most
arsenic is in the form of Arsenic (III). Then meanwhile, with most of
the water that has Arsenic (III), we also have a fair amount of iron and
that also stays as a soluble iron as a reduced form. Then for the water
in several cases, while we have pH values as high as 8.2 and 8.5, for
instance, here in Nambe Pueblo, New Mexico.

Then for the nine adsorption media systems here, the G2 media is being
tested out in Bow, New Hampshire and the system has two vessels and it's
configured in series and the vessel is constructed of extended steel and
the media volume per vessel is 85 cubic feet. The EBCT and the design
flow rate is 18 minutes. For the E33 systems, this is by Severn Trent.
Two of these systems have two parallel units. The other one's here for
Brown City. We have two systems, including two parallel systems
eventually being combined to treat the 650 gallons of water per minute.
The media per vessel is 80 cubic feet and the EBCT for each vessel is
3.7 minutes. For the E33 system by AdEdge, at these three locations at
Nambe Pueblo, Rimrock, and Rollinsford, two of these systems are
arranged in parallel and one in series. All of these vessels are fiber
reinforced plastic and then the media volume is 27 cubic feet with EBCT
right around 4.2 to 4.5 minutes. For GFH (that's by US Filter) and this
is at Reno, Nevada and we have three vessels, arranged in parallel with
carbon steel constructed vessels. Each vessel has 80 cubic feet of media
with EBCT of 5.1 minutes. Then finally this is AAFS media being tested
out in Valley Vista, Arizona - two vessels in series with EBCT of 4.4
minutes.

Then in some cases the system will have some pretreatment. The
pretreatment here includes primarily chlorination and/or pH adjustment.
There are two major purposes of doing chlorination - one is to convert
Arsenic (III) to (V). The other one is to disinfect or to prevent the
biological growth. For the pH adjustment, clearly we tried to adjust the
pH down from 8.2 or 8.5 to right around 7 using either sulfuric acid or
carbon dioxide. Then in several cases, if prechlorination is not being
done, then we have a postchlorination here to provide the chlorine
residual. For Round 1 status here, so far we have eight systems
operational and one system under the iron addition testing, which is
Lidgerwood, North Dakota and then we have one system already installed
but currently we still have some problems in terms of trying to get
water past the bac-t test in Fulton, Idaho. In the meantime, we have two
more systems still to be installed and tested, hopefully, by the end of
year which are Nambe Pueblo and the Reno, Nevada site.

We have a few photographs here to show the systems here. These are the
Severn Trent APU-300 systems. 300 here means 300 gallons per minute. And
this system here is the Desert Sands system at Anthony, New Mexico. The
vessel sites here are 63 x 86 and these two vessels are arranged in
parallel. And this system here is in Stevensville, in Queen Anne County
in Maryland, again, this system is very similar to the systems at
Anthony/Desert Sands, New Mexico. For Brown City, as I said before, that
we have two sets of these systems. Each one has the capacity of 300
gallons per minute and all these vessel sites are similar. For APU-100
systems, at the Rollinsford site, because the water pH is right around
8.2 we are using carbon dioxide to reduce the pH from 8.2 to right
around 7. These two vessels are currently arranged in parallel and this
is the original pumphouse and this is the building that houses the
equipment. This system currently is being installed in Bow, New
Hampshire. These two vessels are constructed of extended steel and the
media here is a G2 manufactured by ADI.

The next system here is being demonstrated in Valley Vista, Arizona. The
media is AAFS 50. That's manufactured by Alcan and the flow rate here is
37 gallons per minute. The vessel is arranged in series. This is the
system in Fruitland, Idaho. These are the ion exchange vessels and this
system is in Climax, Minnesota. These two vessels are the contact tanks
and after the 5 minutes of contact tanks, the water is treated through
this pressure filter using Macrolite media.

Finally, this is a system where we were doing the system modification.
We are studying the water chemistry trying to reduce the soluble arsenic
concentration to less than 10 µg/L. In the meantime, we are trying to
see if there's a need to change the current filtration media, which is
the manganese dioxide coated sand. We're going to see if there's a need
to change it to other media such as Kinetico's Macrolite. What it's
showing here is in order to look at water quality, we have a set of
turbidity meters and also we look at the pressure differential to one of
the four vessels of the filtration cells. In order to reduce the soluble
arsenic concentration to less than 10 µg/L we are adding some ferric
chloride into the water. Before the addition of ferric chloride, the
best the treatment facility can get is about 30 µg/L of arsenic and
based on our latest data, it appears that we'll be able to reduce the
arsenic to less than 10 µg/L.

This is just a summary table here to show the waste disposal. There are
usually two types of waste that will be generated by these treatment
processes; one is the spent media and the other one is the backwash
water. After media is spent, then it looks like the media (in most
cases, and so far we know that it is in all cases) can be tested to pass
the TCLP test for the disposal. Then for the backwash water here. In
most cases, we're talking about 10 to 15 bed volumes of bed water that
get produced with every backwash cycle and then the frequency of the
backwash really depends on how much the solids is intercepted by the
filtration media. Now, in terms of the backwash water disposal, it can
go into some kind of a surface leach field, some holding pond, some
ditch. In one case, it also is being hauled away for offsite disposal.
Otherwise, the wastewater can also be disposed of into the sanitary
sewers.

The map here shows the Round 2 states. Essentially, we have 31 sites in
nineteen states. These are the sites selected by EPA for Round 2
demonstrations. We have five in the East and Northeast area, ten in the
Central Midwest, six in the Midwest area, and ten in the far West area.
The current status is that for the nineteen states, the 31 sites, the
number of sites per state is about one to three and we have 28 community
water systems and we have four non-transient, non-community water
systems and then in terms of the multiple contaminant sites, we have
four, including contaminants such arsenic, uranium, and nitrate. The
sites range from 7 to 600 gallons per minute.

The differences between Rounds 1 and 2 here include the four Round 2
NTNCWSs. Then also we include some POU and POE approaches for the
demonstration. Then also we have multi-contaminant treatment systems.
For Round 1 there was only one - we had Fruitland that would treat only
arsenic and nitrate. For Round 2 we have several other contaminants
involved. The Round 2 technologies that currently are being considered
and selected include all these technologies listed here. Then the status
level of Round 2 demonstration: so far we've been working with the EPA -
Tom and Darren - to visit nineteen sites then out of these nineteen 9
sites, we have conducted five return visits for planning the project to
define the roles and responsibilities. In the meantime, out of those
five sites that we have issued a draft letter of understanding to all
the stakeholders. With that, this is the end of this presentation.

Andrea: Thank you, Abe. I think we had one question that came in. It was
basically dealing with how were these facilities chosen. We have a
system that produces arsenic at .0958 mg/L. So I think what they're
trying to get at with these different demonstration systems that were
chosen (and I think you speak to that in Slide 5 and the selection
process and Tom Sorg might be able to answer this as well), but I think
basically their question is: "how did these sites get chosen?"

Tom: Andrea, I should probably answer that. The first thing we did is we
asked for sites interested in the project to submit information to us
and between Round 1 and Round 2, we received approximately 200 systems
that expressed interest in working with us. When we selected the sites,
there were three major factors that we considered. There were some
others, but they're probably the three major ones. Number one, we wanted
to make sure we had a good geographical distribution. We weren't going
to put them all in California or Arizona. As you can see, we've got them
spread around the country.

The second factor was the arsenic level. We gave higher priority if the
arsenic was high, 50 µg/L than if it was near the MCL of 10 µg/L. So, if
all things were equal, and if a site had 35 or 40, we thought it was a
bigger challenge than if the site was only 9 or 10. And then finally -
and this has to deal with because of the cost of the systems, of course,
the bigger the system, the large the flow that you have treat, there's
more money involved in purchasing the system - so, once again, all
things being equal, we looked for smaller flows rather than larger
flows. We had a number of systems that came in wanting to treat flows of
1,500 gallons a minute and that would have eaten up most of our funds.
So as you can see, in our program, at most of the sites the flows that
we're treating are generally less than 200 or 150 gallons per minute.
There were other water quality factors also involved, but those are
probably the major criteria that we used for selecting the sites.

Andrea: Great, thanks, Tom. I think we'll go ahead and just switch gears
a little bit and go into our panel discussion. We're going to be talking
about the Valley Vista and Rimrock demonstration sites in Arizona that
were chosen during Round 1. We thought it might be interesting to talk
to some of those folks who have been directly involved with these two
systems to give people throughout the country an idea of what they may
be facing and have already faced in trying to get treatment in place for
arsenic. And granted that it's going to be different all over the place,
different systems, different situations, different source water
characteristics, but I think this kind of gives you a good sense of
what's going on and what it takes to get a system going. So we'll have
Tom Sorg as part of the panel discussion along with Lili Wang from
Battelle and then Bill Garfield from the Arizona Water Company. So I
think what I'd like to do first is just start out by having each one of
you explain just a little bit what your role has been with these two
systems and I guess I'll just start out with Tom.

Tom: Well, of course, these two sites in Arizona were part of Round 1.
We selected the two sites in Arizona based upon the criteria mentioned
before. After we selected the sites, then we went out to the engineering
and vendor community and asked them to submit technical proposals. And
they had to submit a proposal for each specific site. And in Round 1, we
had anywhere from only one proposal submitted on a site to, I think up
to six. EPA then convened an expert peer review panel who reviewed the
proposals and their role was to really give us recommendations on which
technologies they thought were ready to go to full scale demonstration.
This is full scale. We're putting these systems in. The water's being
treated and going out into the distribution system. So, some companies
were submitting proposals on technologies that was very apparent that
they still needed to do some research. It hadn't gone much beyond the
bench scale research phase. That process narrowed down the proposals. It
probably eliminated about 50% of them.

After we received their recommendations, then we went out to the site
and we sat down with the utility and the state agency, reviewed the
proposals, and then made our selection and the determination or the
selection of the technology was a mutual decision for the most part
between EPA, the water utility and the state agency. Now, in the case of
the two sites in Arizona, if I recall, and Bill may want to comment,
they were really looking at the same technology for both sites. They
were both adsorption technologies and in this case, we did push one site
to consider a different type of adsorptive media. So one site has the
E33 media. The other one has the Alcan modified activated alumina. We
did not want to demonstrate two identical technologies in the same state
and the two are fairly close to one another. So as a result of our
meetings with Bill, we ended up with those two technologies.

Andrea: Thanks, Tom. Now, Lili, then what kind of role have you had with
these systems?

Lili: Well, we work with Tom Sorg to oversee the site demonstration
activities. We kind of lead all the planning activities and work with
the vendor and the site to go through all the permitting processes and
then after the system is installed, we also conduct the training for the
operator on the data and sample collection and also we review the
operational and analytical data, maintain the operating logistics, and
track the project progress, and then eventually we're going to prepare a
6 month report and also a final report to summarize the performance of
the technology.

Andrea: OK. And Bill you're with Arizona Water Company. Why don't you
talk about your role and then maybe just give a little bit more of an
overview of the systems themselves in terms of the populations served
and some of the arsenic levels.

Bill: Sure - I've worn many hats in this. One was coordinating our
personnel for the onsite monitoring and operation of the plants, but
also was coordinating some of the site preparation, some of the things
we had to do in advance of the vendor being able to install their
facilities onsite. Another role that I played was working with the state
agency to determine what is an adequate monitoring program to ensure
that public health is protected because these are demonstration
facilities that are producing water for our consumers. So we worked with
the agency to come up with a monitoring program and that would ensure
that public health is protected and also provide technical data for the
state agency to review and to determine whether this plant will operate
on a going forward basis. So those are the primary roles that I played.

The systems themselves -Rimrock is a small system located about 90 miles
north of Phoenix. A little over 1,100 customers, population around
3,000. It's totally a groundwater system. Relatively small wells---50 to
300 gallons per minute. Arsenic levels ranging from just under 40 to
just over 50, so fairly high. Valley Vista is about 25 miles northwest
of Rimrock in an area called Oakcreek Village just south of Sedona,
Arizona, a little smaller system. It's around 700 customers, population
of around 1,500. Similar well capacities from probably the Valley Vista
well, which is 37 gallons per minute to around 200 or 250. Arsenic
levels slightly lower from 35 to 45. That's it for the systems.

Andrea: Okay. Great, Bill. Maybe you could just go on and talk about
maybe some of the hurdles that you had to face along the way. I think
you were talking about some of the state interaction you had before,
some of the technical reviews.

Bill: I'll address it from our perspective. For the state agency, the
Arizona Department of Environmental Quality had to review the plant for
the construction and the operation of the plant and until recently there
haven't been many arsenic treatment plants built in Arizona. So this was
a little new for them to review and the technologies were relatively
new. They were not the longstanding technologies, so the E33 product was
a little new for them and it took a little coordination through the
agency to have them become familiar with that. The secondary issue was:
here is water that's going to be produced from the plant - what
frequency of monitoring will we need and for what length of time? And
also sort of dovetailing that process control monitoring with compliance
monitoring. So that took a little bit of the discussion with the agency
and it probably took several weeks or so to get all parties to agree
what the monitoring should be in addition to whatever monitoring EPA or
Battelle was wanting in order to determine the feasibility of the
technology and so forth. And I should mention there is a considerable
amount of time needed to work with a demonstration plant, but even with
that time involved, I can tell you that all of our system operators have
found it to be a very good experience.

Andrea: I think I remember you mentioned at some point that the
operators really had to spend some time going through training for this
new technology.

Bill: That's correct. Most rural parts of Arizona that use groundwater,
other than chlorination, many of them do not have any form of treatment.
So for them it was -even though many of them are qualified treatment
operators - this was a new thing for them. Very exciting for them to be
involved and learning how to use the portable arsenic test kits and
gathering samples and coordinating this with Battelle and others was,
you know, there was a lot to do and it was a lot of coordination between
our system personnel and the EPA contractors and the vendors. So, it
worked out very well.

Andrea: Speaking of contractors, Lili, I think Bill had mentioned in
terms of performance monitoring, well you had to do all the performance
monitoring and I believe you also had some issues of permits or just the
cost of some of the state involvement. Maybe you could talk a little bit
about that?

Lili: Yeah, sure, Andrea. Yeah, I'd like to share our experience with
this permitting process. Essentially, this is kind of a three step
process. First of all, we assembled the engineering plans and submitted
them to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality for approval to
construct and that process took about 5 to 10 weeks to get. The first
one for Rimrock, it took a little bit longer. That's 10 weeks and also
because that's during the holiday season. For Valley Vista, it only took
5 weeks to get that approval.

And after we got that approval, we applied for a construction permit to
the county and that process took about 2 to 3 weeks to get. And once we
got the construction permit, we went ahead to install the system and do
the shakedown and startup and before we connect the water to the
distribution system, we had to get another approval of construction.
Basically, we had an engineer who saw the actual drawings and also we
took the samples for bacteria tests and submitted the results to ADEQ
again for the approval of construction and that process normally should
take about a week to get, but for Rimrock and Valley Vista, it took us
about 2 to 4 weeks to get that approval. So, as you can see, it's a
little bit of a time consuming process, but I think one thing that we
can do to expedite the permitting process is to get the state people
involved at the early stage to get them familiarized with this new
technology to give them some background information so that way I think
it will work out just fine.

Andrea: Sounds good. I guess I'll have to go on to the million dollar
question. How successful has the treatment been so far?

Lili: Well, depends on how you define its success. In terms of removing
arsenic, both technologies worked pretty well. To give you some data,
for example, for the Rimrock system that used the E33 media (that's
iron-based media) and both systems started operation around the end of
June this year. As of October 6, after treating about 2.3 million
gallons of water or 12,000 bed volumes, the B tank in Rimrock right now
has about an arsenic breakthrough of only 2.1 µg/L and the last tank,
the polishing tank, only has 0.4 µg/L of arsenic in the effluent. And
the influent arsenic has about 48 to 80 µg/L. And the other system, the
Valley Vista, that used the alumina based media, that's AAFS 50. After
treating about 6 or 7,000 bed volumes of water, the lead tank had an
arsenic level of about 10 µg/L and then the second tank treated about
13,000 bed volumes before the effluent concentration got to 10 µg/L. So
we think that both technologies can definitely remove arsenic to below
the MCL, it's just a matter of how long it's going to break through and
how often you need to replace the media.

Andrea: That's great. Thanks Lili, for that information. Does anyone
have anything else to add before we go on? We only had about 15 minutes
for this panel discussion, so I don't want to eat into the next
presenter's time. Is there anything else anyone would like to add?

Bill: Just that it's been a good experience.

Lili: Well, maybe I would add a little bit about how we conducted
performance evaluation study. We developed a study plan to kind of
describe our technical approach in terms of how to collect samples and
data. We asked the operator to fill up the daily field log sheets that
record the system's operational data such as flow, pressure, and the
chemical consumption. And also we sent the sample coolers to them once a
week, asked them to collect samples from the raw water and after each
tank and also from the distribution system. So that's on a weekly basis.
And every month, we ask them to do the outside arsenic speciation, so we
know whether there's any Arsenic (III) in the raw water. Other than
that, we also analyze the sample for some water quality parameters such
as alkalinity, fluoride, sulfate, nitrate, also phosphate, silica,
turbidity and those kind of water quality parameters and we also trained
the operator to do the outside measurements using a water meter. For
example, to measure the pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and the redox
potential and also free chlorine. We collect all this data so eventually
we can evaluate the performance of these technologies.

Andrea: Thanks, Lili. Looks like there's obviously been a lot of work
involved, but it sounds like there's been great coordination. I'd like
to thank all the panel members - Tom, Lili, and Bill - for taking part
in this. We probably should go on to Bernie Lucey's presentation. Bernie
has a B.S. in civil engineering and an M.S. in sanitary engineering from
Northeastern University in Boston. Mr. Lucey is a registered
professional engineer in the state of New Hampshire and a member of the
New Hampshire, New England, and American Waterworks Associations. Mr.
Lucey has worked for Boston-area consultant engineers and since 1973 for
the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. He has also been
a member of adjunct faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell
from 1980 to 2002 teaching courses related to water distribution and
treatment. Mr. Lucey is the New Hampshire lead for arsenic and was a
member of the EPA peer review committee for the EPA design manuals on
removal of arsenic from drinking water by adsorptive media and ion
exchange. So with that, Bernie, are you ready to go?

Bernie: I am and I hope you can hear me.

Andrea: I can hear you.

Bernie: That is great. Well, good afternoon from New Hampshire. We are
sort of a northern suburb of the Red Sox nation. I needed to say that
for my other staff members here in the agency. Let's begin by looking at
the arsenic problem as it exists in New Hampshire. It's very much
oriented to very small systems. Those systems are typically using a
bedrock well. That's where the arsenic is - typically 300 to 700 feet
deep. Average of 50 to 75 units, 150 customers approximately. Typical
wells are maybe 20 gallons per minute as an average.

Of the total number of community systems we have (about 700), ten are
currently treating for arsenic. Essentially all of them are using
adsorptive media. That media, up until a year or two ago, was activated
alumina and now as the sales reps for the other new products make their
rounds, some people are rebedding with other medias and trying those out
and so we're just starting to gather up really detailed information as
to how many bed volumes we can get with each type of media on a typical
New Hampshire system. We expect about a hundred more systems will need
some form of arsenic treatment - and I think for the most part, it's
going to be treatment as opposed to say flow mixing - and those systems
obviously have arsenic between 10 and 49 parts per billion.

On the non-transient side, we have about seven systems right now with
treatment and that treatment is sort of a hybrid. We have allowed
systems to put in a dual distribution system and that would consist of a
treatment process as the water comes in through the foundation and a
secondary plumbing system after the water treatment process, which would
deliver treated water, in this case, without arsenic, to various
drinking water fountains throughout either the school or workplace. We
have about thirty more of those systems that need to do something over
the next 18 months or so.

We are fairly lucky in New Hampshire relative to some of the competing
ions that are somewhat problematic with most adsorptive media. We have
very little silica, phosphate, vanadium, sulfate, and generally iron
does not co-occur with arsenic in New Hampshire. It's not a competing
ion, but it certainly would gunk up most media filters. We're lucky not
to have that. We do think that adsorptive media is going to be by far
the approach that most systems use. So, some New Hampshire policies are
a little laxer than the average in terms of drinking water systems. We
do not require professional engineering on water systems that serve less
than 1,000 people. Generally, small engineers we found out don't really
have much experience with drinking water treatment. That consequence
throws the ball to us in the program to be much more hand holding and
much more affirmative action oriented in getting a new program like this
off the ground.

For pilot studies - I know your title talks about pilot studies here in
New Hampshire. To some extent we did those a few years ago, very
fleetingly. We now have reasonable confidence that adsorptive medias are
going to work well across the board in New Hampshire. The geology of New
Hampshire throughout its entire footprint is pretty much the same and so
we know the factors that would create a problem and fortunately those
competing iron factors don't appear to be commonly occurring.

The empty bed contact time issue I think is quite critical and it's
going to be an area that we're going to offer comment when we are going
to design that chooses one of the medias. There's a couple of medias
that are very rapid action and, consequently, the size of the treatment
canister can be quite small. In a pump facility that doesn't have much
floor space, that may be a real asset, but it certainly ties that
particular water system to using only that proprietary product and we're
going to suggest that most people consider a tank size that would allow,
say, 5 minutes or so of empty bed contact time.

Variances, exemptions. We don't expect any variances. I think so far
every utility that has tried arsenic treatment, it's been successful.
It's successful even in the stance of the new and tighter standard. In
terms of exemptions, we would certainly entertain an exemption request
for something like a regional water district, but we don't think any of
those are likely.

The last item on this particular slide: radon floor space. We have
substantial radiological problems here in New Hampshire and we're going
to be asking each utility to look at the floor space requirements for
radon treatment and also for uranium treatment in order to make sure
that they don't squeeze an arsenic treatment system in now and then find
out that they have to totally or significantly rebuild just say a year
or two from now on uranium and 3 or 4 years possibly if the radon
standard ever gets finalized. So I'm going to try to make this a rather
broad evaluation for some of the other factors that are going to effect
very small systems.

So, the way we started out in terms of implementing the arsenic new and
tighter standard was to first develop from our existing laboratory data
a short list of systems that were likely going to have a compliance
problem and we formatted that in part in a mailing list format and we
have provided that readily to sales representatives from the various
media companies so that they can go out and basically help us to partner
with us and help utilities to know what the problem is, what the time
frame for that problem solution is and to at least put one option for
solution in front of those particular utilities.

We also used that mailing list to identify many educational programs
that we've had on arsenic in the last 2 or 3 years and we notified each
of our utilities of the Arsenic Demo Project. Obviously in hindsight,
that was a good idea because we have been most fortunate to have three
of those sites located in New Hampshire.

Arsenic speciation, that is not a laboratory process. So many people,
once they slightly know about arsenic species, they think that it's a
laboratory process. It's really a field collection process and we have
purchased two anion exchange cartridges, approximately 3 inches by 10
inches that go in typical sediment cartridge housings and those
cartridges we loan out to utilities so that they can do a rudimentary
speciation determination on their particular supply sources. Utilities
appreciate that and it certainly drives home to the operators the
importance of species identification.

The slide in front of you now shows this species setup. It is the most
simple thing ever. It's just a whole series of three pieces of rubber
hose, a throttling gate valve, a wall water feed from the supply source.
We do not do a filtration setup at this time or filtration effort. We
just run the water through an anion exchange cartridge, basically ask
the utility not to run anymore than a couple of gallons through this
because we don't want to be buying cartridges left and right and so I've
put together a little example here. So if you look at this schematic, a
species determination would consist of two samples. One sample that
would be treated through the arrangement that you see on the screen and
a second sample that would be raw water. Now, let's look at the very
bottom of the slide that is on the screen. Let's assume that the total
arsenic in this particular example was 35 parts per billion and that the
water that came out of the right hand side of that arrangement that you
saw had an arsenic level of 15. That 15 parts per billion would be the
amount of Arsenic (III) because essentially by definition, Arsenic (III)
will not treat at all using anion exchange resin and then if you do the
subtraction process, 15 subtracted from 35, that gives you the amount of
Arsenic (V) in the sample, which in this particular case was 20 parts
per billion.

Knowing that we are not going to mandate that people preoxidize, we're
going to suggest that they do it, but if they don't want to, many of the
medias will adequately treat both valence (III) and valence (V), but you
get certainly better longevity out of a system where all the arsenic is
in the species (V) format and I think it's worth the effort to
preoxidize, but at the moment we're not requiring it.

So, let's go on to the next slide, "Reducing the Fear Factor." We have,
as you saw in the first slide, probably 130 systems that need to act and
it is really slow going. Why? Because I think there's a fear factor that
this is both a health issue and also they're aren't too many facilities
at the moment where people can develop a confidence level in moving
forward. So we have developed a list of all the medias that are
currently available and at least the ones that we know of. We have a few
more to add to that list. That list is on the reference information that
is part of this Web cast and you'll see that as an appendix to my
presentation. You will see the names of the various suppliers, contact
information, and some signification attributes on each of their media's
characteristics. We need a little bit more time to make perfect that
presentation. I'll have that available in another month or so and people
are welcome to contact me at the email address which will be given at
the end for an updated copy of that.

In the second issue of reducing the sort of fear factors is tours of
existing systems where each of these 15 or 20 systems that currently
exist, we have developed a detailed description of the size of the
facility, the number, the amount of arsenic, the pH, other factors,
including what media they're using and we make that available to people
that would like to go as a group to that existing system or to visit
that existing arsenic treatment system on an individual basis. We
haven't done too many of those groups yet. We're planning that as an
activity this winter when we get otherwise snowed in.

Interaction with EPA. We have spent a lot of time working with EPA and
Tom and Darren and others on the arsenic design manual and around the
year 2000, Lili and others from Battelle came to New Hampshire here and
we happily reviewed two existing arsenic treatment systems that were
very well designed, very well sized and those reports are in various
documents that you may have been referring to earlier, which I hope are
called out on the Web site. In addition, we have the arsenic demo
project. We had an open house in one of those just a couple days ago and
the other ones will be the focus of waterworks meetings and other
presentations over the next year.

Evaluating media. I'm basically suggesting to people that they shouldn't
have a fear factor. They should just jump into it, get something
accomplished now before January of 2006 and if bedding medias come along
in the future or if some of the other medias that are already out there
were not tried, those medias can be evaluated during the first operation
session with whatever media they first choose and that by a small little
3 by 10 cartridge pilot study they can determine with nothing more than
the expense of doing a few arsenic tests, what the cost effectiveness or
the bed volume effectiveness is of one media versus another versus
another. And then at the time that they need to rebed, decide whether
they want to make a change to a different media and try that out for
their second bedding of their treatment process.

[]{.mark}

This little mini pilot system for evaluating the cost effectiveness, and
cost is the key word here, of various absorptive medias as shown on the
slide that's currently on the screen. The only way that differs from the
previous slide is that a water meter's been added so you can determine
bed volume capability. In terms of design criteria, we generally are
talking to systems and not strongly recommending that they try to
develop another alternative water supply in New Hampshire. That would be
staying up in the sand and gravel soils and developing a well in that
material because that material typically does not have any arsenic in
it, but that might be something that one utility might find favorable
because of the favorable water resource availability. Secondly, the
bureau is suggesting a series configuration and strongly suggesting that
and so far most of our new systems are of the series configuration. Tom
very nicely gave some of the attributes of the series configuration and
it's the way that it should repay itself. It certainly is a little more
expensive up front, but it should repay that additional capital cost by
long terms savings and media. We do suggest preoxidation of the water
before it gets to the media.

Spent media removal. I have seen a few repetitions now of removing media
from tanks, be they fiberglass or stainless steel, it's a somewhat
laborious situation. If you have a sidewall port, it's a lot easier to
let the media fall out of the manway that would be in the sidewall of
the tank, but on really small fiberglass tanks, I don't think they're
going to make them with sidewall ports. If you're going to come in from
the top, you're going to need significant head room, at least 4 to 5
feet between the top of the tank and the underside of the ceiling and
hopefully people remember to accommodate that measurement.

Andrea: Bernie? I hate to interrupt you, but you might want to move to
the last few slides a little bit quicker. We want to give Janet a chance
to speak.

Bernie: I think we're essentially there. We're going to drop the
technical approach to the industry soon in favor of sort of tough talk
relative to meeting the standard by January of 2006 and finally at every
opportunity we have, we note that in dealing with the public media, TV
or newspapers, we also mention arsenic in terms of how it spins for a
private well facility because we have a major effort there in private
well outreach. So I thank you very much.

Andrea: Thank you, Bernie, we really appreciate it. Good presentation.
Because we are running a little behind, we are just going to go on to
Janet Cherry from The Cadmus Group and Janet has an engineering degree
and is a registered professional engineer. She's worked in the water
industry for over 15 years in both the private and public sector. She is
a former Montana drinking water employee and currently works for Cadmus
in the Helena, Montana office. So, if you're ready, Janet?

Janet: Yes, I am, Andrea. How much time do I have?

Andrea: Go ahead and present. We may run out of time for questions, but
again, if we don't get to the question and answer period at the end of
this Web cast, again, we'll provide written answers to all the questions
after the Web cast some time. So go ahead and present.

Janet: OK. Great. Thanks Andrea and greetings from Helena, Montana,
where we have snow on the ground this morning. And, of course, we have
no particular affiliation to any of the sports arenas like Bernie does.
With that, we'll get started. We've heard a lot about the arsenic
removal technologies and now we'll examine the residuals created by the
arsenic removal technologies and disposal options that may be available.
As the water system considers disposal options, the water system must
analyze the residual to determine if it's non-hazardous or mixed waste.
I'll define these terms throughout the presentation. The characteristics
of the residuals will depend on the raw water contaminant concentration,
the treatment process that's used, and the operation of the treatment
process. It's also important that the water system understand all
federal, state, and local regulations and the permits that may be
required for each disposal option and as the system looks at the
residual disposal options, they will be different for liquid versus
solid residuals.

Like I said, the arsenic treatment processes, they're will be liquid and
residual streams. The liquid streams can consist of brine, backwash
water, rinse water, acid neutralization water. These four liquid streams
would result with anion exchange process, the backwash water will be a
liquid stream generated during backwash of any adsorptive or granular
media. A concentrate will be realized with use of reverse osmosis
technology, the reject stream that's created as the water passes through
the reverse osmosis membrane.

As far as solids go, there'll be spent resins. These could be your spent
anion exchange resin. Spent filter media. This will result if the
system's using granular media filter or an adsorptive media. Spent
membranes - it's when the RO membrane reaches it's useful life - those
membranes need to be disposed of - and sludges. So, for instance, during
the backwash process if there's some settling and sedimentation of the
backwash water prior to disposal, there'll be a sludge created that the
system needs to consider along with the liquid as the sludge is
dewatered.

Here's just a quick example of an anion exchange process as some of the
liquid residual streams that will be created as the anion exchange bed
is regenerated. There'll be a regenerate stream that's created. A
backwash stream and also a rinse water that will be regenerated. The
characteristics of each one of these individual streams during the
regeneration process will be quite different. So it's important that the
water system understand the concentrations of arsenic and co-occurring
contaminants in the residual streams during the regeneration process and
that will factor into the disposal option available.

As far as waste identification. Again, it is the water system's
responsibility to analyze the residual stream and determine what type of
waste they're working with. If it's solid or liquid. If it's a solid, as
far as disposal goes, the system will have to do a paint filter test to
determine if there are free liquids present. To determine if the waste
is hazardous or not, the main test is the toxicity characteristic
leaching procedure, or the TCLP test, and for those of you in
California, there's another test that needs to be performed - a waste
extraction test. And then another category of waste that might occur is
mixed waste and this is when the waste is both hazardous as determined
by the TCLP test and if the waste contains more than 0.05% uranium or
thorium by weight so this might be a problem for those systems using a
technology such as anion exchange that removes both uranium and arsenic.

So what tests does the system need to perform to determine if the waste
is hazardous or not? These are regulated by RCRA, the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act, a federal regulation, and first the
system will do a paint filter liquid test to determine any free liquids
and then the TCLP test is performed and under TCLP, there are metals and
organics that are regulated. Arsenic is one of the eight metals
regulated under RCRA and the current limit under RCRA for arsenic is 5.0
mg/L. So if under the TCLP test if the arsenic concentration in the
leachate that is produced as part of the TCLP test is greater than 5.0
mg/L, it will be determined hazardous and please make a note that the
limit of this 5.0 mg/L in RCRA is not tied to the arsenic MCL set forth
in the federal drinking water regulations. These are two separate
regulations. So, when the new arsenic limits take place in January 2006,
it will not effect the RCRA regulations unless somebody goes back in and
changes the limits in RCRA.

The paint filter liquid test, I've mentioned that. It's to determine if
there's any free liquid present in the waste. Waste containing free
liquids are banned from disposal in municipal solid waste landfills and
hazardous waste landfills. The concern with free liquids is that they
could migrate and contaminate any nearby groundwater or surface water in
the vicinity of the landfill. The liquid waste that may be contained in
the solid waste must be disposed of too, so if there's dewatering of
your sludge or your media after the media has reached its useful life,
the water system needs to consider the disposal of both the media or
sludge or solids and then the liquid that's created.

The TCLP test, the toxicity character leaching procedure, predicts if
hazardous components of a waste are likely to leach out. Under RCRA,
there are eight metals and 32 organics and again, arsenic is one of the
eight metals regulated and if you exceed any of the limits as
established under RCRA during the TCLP test then your waste will be
classified as hazardous and the system must consider special disposal
options.

I've mentioned mixed waste. Again, mixed waste is when the water has
been determined to be hazardous as done under RCRA and the TCLP test and
contains more than 0.05% uranium or thorium by weight, then you have
mixed waste and you're into a whole different set of licensing and
disposal of that waste. Here's a list of disposal options for liquid
residuals. Again, those are brine, backwash water, rinse water, acid
neutralization water and concentrates. The water system could discharge
directly to a surface water body. This would require a permit an NPDES
permit and then there would probably be some pretreatment involved in
order for the water system to do this. Another option is to discharge to
the publicly owned treatment works or the wastewater plant. There will
be a permit required and some pretreatment in order to make sure
whatever the water treatment plants into the POTW does not cause any
interference or violations of permits that the POTW has.

There's also an issue with TBLLs - that's technically based local
limits - that the POTW must meet. They're imposed by local regulations
and, again, so whatever the water treatment plant sends to the POTW it
can't cause any problems or upsets at the POTW. Another option for the
liquid residuals is injection into a Class I underground injection
control well. And this type of injection well will accept hazardous,
non-hazardous, and mixed waste but a permit is required. It could be
quite expensive and the last option there on the screen is injection to
a Class V UIC well. An example of this might be taking the liquid
residual to a septic tank and drain field and it's probably an option
only for our smaller systems generating a small waste stream.

For our solids, there's landfill options and depending if the waste is
hazardous or not, there's two types of land fills. Again, any time you
go to a landfill, there can be no free liquids present in your solids
and the landfill owner always has the option to refuse any waste
regardless of whether it's hazardous or not depending on what type of
landfill you're going to so it might be worth communicating with the
landfill prior to considering this as a disposal option and then if you
have mixed waste, there's only a few landfills in the country that will
take mixed waste.

Again, the water system needs to be aware of intermediate processing of
the residual. So, for instance, if there's sludge, there'll be some
dewatering prior to disposal and every time you do another process,
intermediate process, you're creating another waste stream that requires
consideration for disposal. So, in closing, I just would like to remind
everyone that the raw water characteristics, treatment process, and
operation of the treatment process will effect your quantity and quality
of residuals and it is the owner of the water system's responsibility to
test and make sure what type of waste they're creating and if it's
hazardous or not. So I think that sums it up. Thanks, Andrea.

Andrea: Thanks, Janet. Really appreciate the presentation. We are just
about out of time and I do apologize that we're not able to address some
of the questions that came in. There is some really good questions.
Unfortunately we went over a little bit in some of the presentations, so
we will get back to your questions and we will provide answers and post
them on our website as we have in the past with the Radionuclides Web
cast. So look for those in about a month or so. I'd like to thank
everyone for attending today's Web cast and I hope you were able to
glean some useful information here about the various treatment
technologies and what seems to be working and logistics of setting up
some of this new technology and also some of the pitfalls you may
encounter. I'd also like to remind everyone of the next arsenic rule
webcast scheduled for December 1^st^ from 2-4 Eastern Time. This Web
cast will focus on an overview of rule implementation, includes
compliance, monitoring, health effects, point of use, and exemptions and
most likely with the exemptions, we'll be focusing more on the financial
aspects of approving exemptions. So I hope you can join us then. Thank
you.

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