San Angelo Flirts With Potable Reuse

San Angelo, TX, a city with hefty water challenges, may latch onto potable reuse as a solution to its drought troubles.

A study that began last year examined the potential for the city to treat and reuse wastewater in the drinking water supply, according to the San Angelo Standard-Times. The study was launched when officials saw that San Angelo had "less than 15 months of water remaining before [it would be] bone dry," San Angelo Live reported.

Bill Riley, the city’s water utilities director, said regulatory barriers to potable reuse are low.

“I don’t think getting it permitted (by the state) will be a problem at all,” Riley said, per the Standard-Times.

The city is torn between reusing treated effluent in the drinking water supply versus releasing it back into the environment first. If it goes the "toilet-to-tap" direction, the concern is that the public will rally against the decision. But releasing treated wastewater into the environment first is more expensive.

“If you put it back into a lake or streams you have losses. You’re dirtying it back up. There’s not any cost savings and there’s more loss,” Riley said, per the report. “The best way to avoid that is to not do it.”

The city has already begun lobbying the state for wastewater reuse funding, but efforts have stagnated. "In February, the city had sent an initial application for a $150 million low-interest loan from the Texas Water Development Board’s State Water Implementation Fund for Texas, or SWIFT, for the wastewater reuse project, but the project was not on the prioritization list the TWDB recently released," the report said. Riley said the city may apply again.

The city, which uses about 13,000 acre-feet of water per year, is running out of water. "All the major cities in West Texas — Lubbock, Midland, Odessa, San Angelo and Abilene — are under some kind of water restrictions," the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported. San Angelo relies on the Hickory Aquifer, a minor aquifer in the middle of the state, according to the water development board.

“We can’t meet all our city needs with just the Hickory,” Riley said, per the Standard-Times. “We could use some of the water out of Lake Nasworthy and Twin Buttes Reservoir to prolong the Hickory water while we’re developing something else, but if we were having to pull the maximum amount that we can out of the Hickory, you’d see that by 2022 all the banked water will be gone.”

So far, Wichita Falls, TX, is the only U.S. city to serve recycled wastewater to homes, according to KALW, a public radio station.