Case Studies
Three Rivers Regional Landfill - Pontotoc, Mississippi
Hybrid CoVAP™ Configuration
CoVAP™ stands for Cogeneration for Industrial Evaporation. A Hybrid CoVAP™ configuration combines cogeneration with additional heat from a landfill gas flare. This configuration is particularly valuable when you want to use the thermal energy from cogeneration beneficially but there is insufficient heat to evaporate all your leachate.
The Hybrid CoVAP solution provided clear economic benefit to Three Rivers by allowing Three Rivers to run at full capacity while using less LFG. This capability maximizes the value of landfill gas by always running the energy plant and never having to compromise between generating renewable energy and evaporating leachate.
Challenges
Three Rivers, like many landfills, had a long-standing relationship with its local publicly Owned Treatment Works (“POTW”) which had been accepting 12,000 to 24,000 GPD of its landfill leachate for many years.
Unfortunately, transport and disposal (“T&D”) costs were consistently rising and Three Rivers was paying over $0.09/gallon for off-site leachate disposal. Adding to Three Rivers concerns was talk that the local POTW may discontinue accepting leachate and the T&D cost for the next closest disposal outlet would be over $0.20/gallon.
Faced with rising costs and the threat of a steep change that could double or triple its costs without warning, Three Rivers took proactive steps to ‘control its own destiny.’
Solution
Three Rivers selected the lowest total life-cycle cost option that met its requirements, which was the Heartland Concentrator in a 25,000 gpd Hybrid CoVAP configuration.
Joseph J. Brunner LANDFILL - New Sewickley township, pa
Challenge
The Joseph J. Brunner landfill receives approximately 70,000 tons of municipal solid waste per year and generates approximately 6.5 million gallons of landfill leachate per year.
For more than a decade, the landfill has managed its leachate treatment process using thermal evaporation.
Solution
Brunner Landfill upgraded its treatment strategy to better address their current and future needs using the Heartland Concentrator.
The strategy utilizes the combustion of landfill gas to fuel the Heartland Concentrator, resulting in greater than 95% volume reduction of the leachate and high operational uptime, while maintaining operational flexibility to accommodate variable landfill gas and leachate flow rates.
USA POWER PLANT
SOLUTION
The Heartland Concentrator proved to be a strong option to treat FGD wastewater for ZLD.
System availability was greater than 90%.
The concentrator could process this water, as well as highly variable water occurring during startup, outage, flushing and other routine operations.
The effluent total solids concentration averaged more than 60% which was an impressive 10% above the initial target.
Simply stated, Heartland Water Technology played a crucial role in supporting the plant’s ZLD compliance.
Challenge
Heartland Water Technology, Inc. was asked to provide a wastewater treatment system to evaporate Flue Gas Desulfurization (FGD) purge water at a Steam Electric Power Plant using Coal as the fuel source. The primary project goal was to demonstrate reliable operation and achieve Zero Liquid Discharge.
Georgia Power's Plant Bowen
Solution
Heartland developed an integrated design utilizing flue gas from a utility's air quality control system as the sole thermal energy source for evaporation. This configuration is attractive for many reasons:
Flue gas is a viable waste-heat energy source, providing favorable economics for evaporative wastewater treatment compared to other energy sources.
Integration as a closed-loop vapor system would allow for concentrator operation without effect on current air emissions or permitting.
Entrained fly ash in the flue gas provides suspended particulates that may aid in solidification and stabilization of residuals as part of a (ZLD) process.
Challenge
To transition toward future ELG compliance, the power industry has evaluated many technologies in recent years. Many of these technologies were found to be cost prohibitive, resource intensive, or excessively challenging to operate due to:
Scaling of heat exchanger surfaces and other process equipment resulting in excessive downtime and cleaning.
Chemical pretreatment requirements resulting in additional process complexity, waste disposal, and prohibitive operating costs
Operational hypersensitivity to changes in water chemistry requiring significant monitoring technology and laboratory resources to mitigate process upsets and resulting downtime.