Advance Notice

Budget

$200,000

Objectives

• Advance the knowledge of phosphorus removal through anoxic phosphorus uptake in BNR, EBPR, S2EBPR, and shortcut nitrogen removal processes such as PdNA.
• Develop design and operational guidelines and control strategies.

Budget

$200,000

Objectives

• Improve receiving water quality by fostering widespread adoption of disinfection technologies at locations throughout sewersheds and at potential peak wet weather flow management points within water resource recovery facilities.
• Identify cost-effective solutions and add to a utility’s decision toolbox for combined and sanitary sewer overflow mitigation strategies.

Budget

$275,000

Objectives

• Perform a state-of-the-practice review of types of natural and engineered media most frequently used in nature-based retention, detention, and infiltration practices across different water matrices.
• Perform lab-scale and pilot-scale tests, while considering future full-scale tests on the most common media using different water matrices, and quantify performance over time.
• Evaluate risks associated with media extraction and disposal after media has reached useful life.
• Holistically compare tradeoffs of different media types across different water matrices.

Budget

$250,000

Objectives

• Provide accurate whole-plant nitrous oxide emissions estimates for a number of water resource recovery facilities that employ commonly used treatment processes, by employing continuous online monitoring or representative periodic monitoring for a minimum one-year period.
• Develop guidance on process conditions that lead to high nitrous oxide formation risk at the facilities by monitoring other process conditions alongside nitrous oxide production.

Budget

$150,000

Objectives

• Identify the characteristics of partnerships that strengthen reuse project planning and the characteristics of those projects that lent themselves to successful collaboration.
• Provide a curated collection of example legal agreements (i.e., contracts, MOUs, JPAs) successfully used to support utility collaboration on reuse projects.
• Evaluate projects with multiple funding sources and provide examples of funding mechanisms and financing structures that most benefit multi-agency projects.
• Synthesize the regulatory approaches taken by existing interagency projects and develop an outline for regulatory streamlining approaches.
• Develop negotiation guidance that is specific to project types or collaboration scenarios that include the appropriate discussion points and questions to ask that will guide development of successful agreements.
• Identify the costs and benefits of increased collaboration in reuse planning, utilizing case studies to help agencies make the business case for integrated planning.

Budget

$150,000

Objectives

• Better understand what is needed when recruiting individuals for the water sector workforce.
• Better understand organizational best practices needed to facilitate recruitment.
• Better understand organizational best practices for facilitating collaboration and promoting retention.

Budget

$150,000

Objectives

• Provide a comprehensive/robust compendium of case studies (as a monitoring tool) on policy and regulatory approaches showcasing an understanding of methods, parameters, and drivers that impact ecosystem health at the watershed and sewershed scales.
• Provide a summary of case studies of economic approaches to achieving healthy watersheds and sewersheds.

Budget

$200,000

Objective

Develop and establish cost effective strategies for the best management practices/control for PFAS in all water sources.

Budget

$250,000

Objectives

• Develop a standardized approach for the water sector to determine baseline GHG emissions according to common unit process, and evaluate the impact of process/operational changes to their systems.
• Establish a “GHG emissions library” with basic framework in place that allows future updates as GHG emission data from unit processes become more available.

Budget

$150,000

Objectives

• Identify the state-of-the-art for emerging condition assessment methods and innovative rehabilitation technologies.
• Connect with advanced techniques from artificial intelligence / machine learning with a specific focus on collection system integrity.

Budget

$300,000

Objective

Evaluate and demonstrate molecular microbial tools to improve operation and optimization of biofiltration.

Budget

$225,000

Objectives

• Summarize the state of practice for integrating nature-based solutions with conventional/gray infrastructure treatment trains across different water matrices.
• Assess water quality performance capabilities of mixed treatment trains using existing datasets and/or published literature values.
• Identify socio-technical opportunities and barriers for better integration.
• Evaluate proposed solutions for energy, chemical, and/or other operations and maintenance cost savings.
• Perform a triple bottom line (or similar) analysis to holistically evaluate the tradeoffs of mixed treatment trains vs. full conventional/gray or full nature-based.

Budget

$200,000

Objectives

• Outline the benefits of a natural asset management system and solution for utilities and water resource managers.
• Incorporate assessment metrics into natural assets, which will provide a more complete accounting framework that can be scaled up to watershed and community levels, including initial capital investment and long-term impacts.
• Enhance accounting and monetization frameworks for natural assets and green infrastructure so that an effective approach to natural asset management has the confidence of utilities, government, funders, financial/economic managers, and regulators.
• Expand existing case studies illustrating where and how natural asset management systems have been implemented in the water sector, outlining the challenges faced, solutions found, and benefits realized.

Budget

$150,000

Objectives

• Advance the optimization of the layout of sensor networks and sensing techniques in collection systems.
• Improve data analytics and intelligent platform/dashboard environments to help with operations for range of flow conditions and control schemes, preventive and in-time maintenance of collection systems, and optimization of capital improvement programs.

Budget

$350,000

Objective

Evaluate the use of ozone nanobubbles for drinking water treatment.

Budget

$200,000

Objectives

• Identify source water protection, watershed-level point and non-point pollution prevention, interception, and remediation strategies, and quantify the costs and benefits of each by focusing on high-priority situations.
• Identify the performance measures that need to be applied to different protection activities to assess the economic value, return on investment, operational, water quality and quantity, and ecological outcomes, along with developing a framework for measurement of these at local, regional, and watershed scales.
• To provide clear and robust guidance to help utilities (1) identify targeted areas for source water protection that are relevant to their core businesses and implement meaningful strategies and options, and (2) measure the performance of interventions at the watershed scale.

Budget

$150,000

Objectives

• Identify the key factors related to implementation of regional and/or integrated brine management solutions and assess opportunities based on current and future One Water scenarios.
• Investigate approaches for regional and/or integrated brine management.
• Develop regionalized brine management planning guidance based on current successful and potential regional/integrated brine projects, including how to identify and quantify the salt loading sources in a watershed.
• Develop an approach where inland desalination could be feasible by providing a viable brine management approach.
• Develop a One Water plan that could be implemented and form part of a water resources management strategy where water utilities, the power industry, and various communities could benefit from augmented water supply, reduction of salt accumulation, and secured access to both water and power.

Budget

$600,000

Objectives

• Evaluate changes in disaggregated water uses in single-family and multi-family households, including collecting current data from sites that statistically represent their service areas and analyzing the data to identify variations in water used by each fixture or appliance. Outdoor analysis should be limited, such as focus on analyzing outdoor usage with lot size and pervious areas.
• Evaluate differences and similarities between single-family and multi-family households.
• Compare results from this study with past end-use studies to develop water use trends over time.
• At a high level, discuss how housing class composition has changed over the last 15 years in the study area.

Budget

$200,000

Objective

Establish a universal approach for identifying/developing all necessary system components involved in optimizing utility operations using energy data (i.e., sensors, sensor data, communications, centralized data storage, data analytics, process decision modeling, administrative ownership and management, etc.).

Budget

$200,000

Objective

Conduct detailed case studies of high-consequence valves, provide an objective evaluation of existing maintenance approaches, and inform exploration of new maintenance approaches.

Budget

$250,000

Objectives

• Identify the key microorganisms (e.g., mechanisms, kinetics), reliable measurement and tools, operational conditions, and challenges (e.g., competition and impact with amendments) with internally stored carbon used for a variety of BNR process configurations.
• Demonstrate that there is scalable benefit to combined nitrogen and phosphorous removal and densification to provide clear benefit/drawback statements associated with proposed concepts.
• Develop a utility guidance document on design, operation, costs, and control strategies for BNR process configurations that promotes and sustains long-term carbon storage and utilization.

Budget

$200,000

Objectives

• Validate cost effective strategies for best management practices/control for multiple contaminants and constituents of emerging concern in all water sources.
• Evaluate benefit/cost guidance to utilities in determining viable treatment options at water resource recovery facilities or the sources.
• Address current research gaps in the One Water framework such as analytical techniques and screening tools, characterization and predictive modeling, and potential health impacts.