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The Costs of Small Drinking Water Systems Removing Arsenic from Groundwater
Citation:
Sorg, T., L. Wang, AND A. Chen. The Costs of Small Drinking Water Systems Removing Arsenic from Groundwater. JOURNAL OF WATER SUPPLY: RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY - AQUA. IWA Publishing, London, Uk, 64(3):219-234, (2015).
Impact/Purpose:
Provide research information to public
Description:
Between 2003 and 2011, EPA conducted an Arsenic Demonstration Program whereby the Agency purchased, installed and evaluated the performance and cost of 50 small water treatment systems scattered across the USA. A major goal of the program was to collect high-quality cost data (capital and operational and maintenance) from the long-term operation (1 to 4 years) of these systems to remove arsenic from drinking water under the real world operating conditions. The technologies consisted of adsorptive media (AM), iron removal (IR), coagulation/filtration (C/F), ion exchange (IX), reverse osmosis (RO), and point-of-use devices. This paper presents the capital and operational and maintenance (O&M) cost of 48 treatment systems ranging in sizes from 10 to 770 gal/min (gpm). The capital cost of the systems ranged from $477 to $6,171 per gpm of design flow and the O&M cost from $0.07 to $22.88 per 1,000 gal of treated water. Despite the large variations in cost, the data showed a general trend of decreasing cost with increasing size. In general, AM has a lower capital, but a higher O&M cost than IR, CF, and IX. The media replacement cost for the AM systems, which varied by media type and media life, accounted for an average of 80% of the O&M cost and was the major cause of the high O/M cost of the AM systems..
