A tale of two conferences – WIPE and EWWM

I was luckily enough to attend and present at the joint IWA / WEF conference on Innovations in Process Engineering in Portland at the beginning of June this year, here are some of my takeaways.

• Wonderfully engaged community of technical people with a high degree of mutual respect for each other and the work they each do.
• Lots of consideration for doing short-cut nitrogen removal on the main plant, with a preference for partial denitrification and anammox.
• A strong focus on achieving low dissolved oxygen activated sludge to reduce energy costs and reduce carbon associated with grid electricity consumption.
• Process intensification techniques and technologies ranging from granule formation, ballasting, biofilm augmentation and alternative solids separation techniques (including dynamic membrane filtration) are extremely popular.
• Massive encouragement of young professionals to engage and begin the process of transition from the old to the new guard.
• An attempt to understand the microbial populations across a range of applications, but especially across biological phosphorus removal.
• Great examples of technology collaboration with technology mashups giving big potential process improvements (e.g., MABR + Hydrocylones, Microvi and Advanced Primary Treatment).
• Greenhouse gas emissions are not being considered in any real meaningful way especially nitrous oxide and methane and are not high on the US water industry agenda so was disappointing, I could also argue that some of the pursued approaches in the US would have a detrimental impact on process emissions which would be a retrograde step.
• Innovation development in the US and a willingness to push boundaries by the utility owners was great to see, with long term, staged plans that support new technology development not just implementation of already proven technologies.?
• Consultants in the US really get stuck into the weeds of new technology development, actively involved with technology developers as well as seeking to develop their own methods/technologies/processes.

In early July I spent two days at the European Wastewater Management Conference so it was wonderful to have the opportunity to see the differences between UK and US wastewater industry perspectives.??At the EWWM there were extensive presentations devoted to achieving net-zero, with a big emphasis on process emissions.??The conference organisers (AquaEnviro) had matched the technical presentations by a thought-provoking keynote speaker (Dr. Rupert Read) as well as low carbon (vegetarian) meals for lunch.??Water companies and consultants were keen to present on the work they have done in in understanding process emissions, however there was little with respect to how we reduce these emissions (with the exception of STW and their net-zero exemplar site).??Maybe next year it will be less on measurement but more on reduction! We need to act quickly!

Nature-based solutions featured heavily especially for storm treatment (for small treatment plants) which was encouraging to see, which parallel with nature-based solutions I’ve seen in the US for nitrogen removal. How to do them at scale will be challenge we should look to take on for the future.

In contrast to the IPE conference, there were limited presentations on technical innovation, with only a handful of suppliers providing insight into new processes being evaluated or implemented.??It took a US presenter to introduce process intensification as a term to the conference, despite its commonality in the US and it being one of the last presentations of the conference left little time for debate.

Perhaps this reflected the current demands on the UK industry and the short-term AMP cycle not providing the same opportunity to evaluate technical innovations over a longer period, reducing the UK appetite to implement these technologies. Or perhaps it's the delivery models which promote greater risk adversity across the tier 1 supply chain?

It’s interesting to see the differences in technical focus between the US and UK, I can’t say I’m not disappointed to see such a lack of focus on greenhouse gas emissions from the US, despite the push to lower energy use.??Equally I was disappointed not to see more early-stage innovation being discussed outside of technology suppliers in the UK. OFWAT outlined the difficulty in going from innovation testing to actual adoption - a challenge being addressed by Isle Utilities excellent Trial Reservoir.?I am however heartened to see such an emphasis placed on net-zero by the UK so looking forward to seeing much more progress in the future. Some cross region knowledge transfer would I believe be of enormous benefit to both our industry and our planet so I cannot understate the importance of these conferences in helping to stimulate this so a big thankyou to WEF, IWA and Aqua-Enviro in continuing to give us opportunities to share, learn, transfer and improve.