The Effect of Source Water Quality on Water Treatment Costs: Evaluation of Source Water Protection Practices

• Author / Creator

  Mukhtarov, Ravkat

• A few high-profile forest fires and floods in recent history has exposed the vulnerability of Canadians’ drinking water supply systems to extreme events and their long-lasting consequences. Elevated levels of contaminants in surface waters can force downstream communities to engage in costly adaptive behaviors, increase public health risks, and force the implementation of expensive infrastructure investments. The conventional way of dealing with such challenges is investing in grey infrastructure. However, public infrastructure investment is costly, and there is evidence of underinvestment in conventional water treatment infrastructure. This creates the need for finding alternative solutions to improve the resilience of our communities for drinking water safety.
  The main objective of this thesis is to improve understanding of the effects of water quality and water quality distributions on expected water treatment costs. For this, we develop an investment framework that incorporates community costs that arise when there are disruptions to water supply into total cost analysis. The framework allows us to estimate the benefits of different investment options in terms of avoided water supply costs, including both green and grey infrastructure projects. We conduct a proof-of-concept case study using in-plant data from the Glenmore water treatment plant in Calgary. We model the future distribution of water quality based on 11 years of daily data on water quality and quantity at the in-take and model future distributions of water treatment costs based on five years of costs and operational data.
  Using the total cost distributions, we conduct scenario analysis to assess the benefits of different investment options. Namely, we consider two scenarios of increased resilience of the plant and two scenarios of improved source water quality. We conclude that previous studies may have significantly underestimated potential benefits from green infrastructure projects by excluding community costs from the analysis. Moreover, we conclude that investing in source watershed protection practices can yield benefits in terms of avoided water treatment costs and avoided community costs. However, a cost-effectiveness assessment is needed to compare green and grey alternatives.
  Our study evaluates alternative capital investment options that can be considered along with conventional grey investment to tackle challenges presented by extreme events, aging infrastructure, and population growth. Investing in ecosystem infrastructure can be one such alternative as it has the potential to reduce water treatment costs as well as outside community costs.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • water infrastructure
  • ecosystem infrastructure
  • green infrastructure
  • ecosystem services
  • Environmental Economics
  • Water quality

• Graduation date

  Spring 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-7fv5-hh96

• License

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