Near the southern end of the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel in Suffolk, inside what looks like a typical office building, the Hampton Roads Sanitation District is trying to revolutionize sewage.
About one million gallons of wastewater from around the region flow through HRSD’s Nansemond Treatment Plant each day to a series of high-tech filtration systems at the SWIFT Research Center.
Sewage water goes in. Clean drinking water comes out.
The layers in between include UV disinfection, activated carbon absorption, ozonation and more, said Hannah Stohr, a doctoral student in civil engineering at Virginia Tech who interns and conducts research at the Suffolk center.
“We have tons and tons and tons of redundancy to remove as many pathogens as possible at every single stage,” she said. “So the water is super clean.”
HRSD launched what it calls the Sustainable Water Initiative for Tomorrow in 2018. Now, the district is using a $1 billion loan from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to expand and ultimately treat about 50 million gallons of wastewater per day and release it underground.
HRSD officials say the project puts them at the forefront of water treatment innovation worldwide. That was born out of necessity.
For more than a century, Virginia has been withdrawing groundwater from the Potomac aquifer, an underground water body that provides much of eastern Virginia’s drinking water.
“We continue to take water out, but it naturally recharges so slowly that it can't keep up with the amount of water that we've taken out,” said Lauren Zuravnsky, SWIFT’s director of design and construction.
That means we’re losing a key source of potable water. It also contributes to land subsidence, or sinking.
Hampton Roads’ high rate of subsidence — not just from groundwater withdrawal but also in response to natural geologic forces — is a key driver of the region’s high rate of sea level rise. As the land sinks, waters rise even more.
Zuravnsky said HRSD hopes the SWIFT project, by injecting treated water back into the aquifer, can reverse some subsidence as well as prevent saltwater intrusion.
Meanwhile, the district also faces state and federal requirements to limit pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. A large part of the multi-state bay restoration effort regulates how many nutrients can run into the bay from sources including farms and wastewater treatment plants.
Jay Bernas, general manager and CEO, said HRSD had to do something in order to meet those regulations.
“The main driver for us doing SWIFT is regulatory compliance,” he said.
The SWIFT expansion should reduce the total amount of nitrogen entering waterways from HRSD by 70% compared to 2021 levels, and phosphorus by 50%, Bernas said.
Officials expect to complete $2.8 billion in projects by 2028.
The massive EPA loan covers about $1.3 billion of that, through the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program.
The master agreement divides the low-interest loan into four installments that started in 2020. Most recently, HRSD received the third tranche of $268 million.
The money helps expand SWIFT to the Nansemond Treatment Plant in Suffolk and James River Treatment Plant in Newport News, which will pilot a new method of denitrification.
The district also plans to decommission the Boat Harbor Treatment Plant in Newport News that sits on the north end of the MMMBT. Instead, they’re building a seven-mile-long force main running under the shipping channel that will pump sewage to the Nansemond site.
