eHT provided professional planning, piloting, design, and construction services for the City of Roscoe for groundwater treatment plant improvements, including construction of a 0.5 MGD (350 gpm) groundwater treatment plant. The City utilized groundwater as its only water supply source. The City’s groundwater is high in nitrate, exceeding the EPA’s maximum contaminant limit for nitrate, resulting in noncompliance with state and federal drinking water regulations. While nitrate can be easily removed via a low capital and O&M cost intensive treatment technology such as ion exchange, the City’s groundwater also has high hardness, which results in an overall lower cost of treatment for an RO system. Since the groundwater has low concentrations of other foulants, an RO system could be constructed with little more than cartridge filtration for pretreatment. RO treatment is still considered an innovative treatment technology by the TCEQ, and site-specific performance pilot testing is required. However, due to the need to accelerate the project schedule and place the RO system online as soon as possible, eHT coordinated with the TCEQ to obtain approval for full-scale performance testing for one of the first RO systems tested in this manner in Texas.

The project provided improved finished water quality from the City’s existing wells that is compliant with both state and federal drinking water standards. In this project, an industrial discharge permit was not required, as the City’s wastewater treatment facility has sufficient capacity to accept daily GWTP wastewater flows.