Mexican Power Plant Meeting Tough Wastewater Challenges

By Geoff Hong, Regional Sales Manager – Water and George Di Falco, Communications Coordinator, Eco-Tec Inc.

Recovering water for boiler feed makeup can come with many challenges for power stations; however, the level of complexity involved with treatment is raised considerably when having to deal with municipal wastewater.

Boiler feedwater needs to be of very high –‘ultrapure' –quality for power stations, and thus requires a lot of treatment to avoid problems such as corrosion, scale and sludge, caustic embrittlement, and priming and foaming in boilers – all tremendously costly setbacks if allowed to take root.

Wastewater applies to a range of sources from municipal sewage to storm runoff, and may have characteristics of great variability. Typically, wastewater has high levels of dissolved solids, higher metals content than natural water sources, and potentially high levels of organic matter, both natural and manmade.