Star City treatment plant cited in national engineering competition

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) — For designing major upgrades to the Star City Wastewater Treatment Plant, which was fully completed in 2022, Strand Associates, Inc., has earned a National Recognition Award for exemplary engineering achievement in the American Council of Engineering Companies’ (ACEC) 56th annual Engineering Excellence Awards.

The renovations upgraded the plant's treatment capacity from 12 million gallons a day to more than 20 million gallons a day, according to the Morgantown Utility Board, which owns and operates the plant. There is room to grow to 28 million gallons a day.

The facility was first built in 1964, with the first major upgrade coming in 1983 following the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. Through the years, the plant received what Greg Shellito, manager of treatment & production, called piecemeal upgrades.

When the decision was made in 2017 to upgrade the plant, it was with future growth in mind, Shellito explained. If current growth trends in the area continue, the plant is good until 2035 before it will require another upgrade – which is already planned for with the hard infrastructure built as part of the recent renovations.

According to the ACEC, a critical part of the upgrades was the sequencing. Shellito agreed.

You can't just shut everything down and say, ‘OK, we're not going to treat wastewater. You've got three, four years to finish your construction.’ We had to stay online and process all the wastewater we could during this entire construction period," Shellito said. "So that's what makes the sequencing very, very important. … We had to kind of figure out and stage things in different phases so we can actually keep the plant going."

The upgrades included a new 1.4 million gallon digester, which is where all of the organic solids collected through the treatment process end up. After roughly 45 days in the main tank, the waste is moved to secondary and tertiary tanks before eventually ending up covering a farmers field as nutrient rich compost, Shellito said.

Methane gas is emitted as part of the digestion process and in an effort to be as green as possible, Shellito explained the MUB uses that gas to heat the process itself and heat its buildings on site. The rest is burned off.

Renovations also added a membrane bioreactor plant, which operates in parallel with more traditional treatment methods. Shellito said the membrane system can treat more water in the same space because the organisms which break down the organic material are more concentrated.

After the water has flowed through the entire treatment process, the last step before it's released into the Monongahela River is to disinfect it with ultraviolet light.

On a tour of the plant, Shellito showed WV News the finished product ready to be released into the river, and it was indistinguishable from a glass of drinking water from one's tap. It's cleaner than the river it enters about 99% of the time, Shellito said proudly.

Other upgrades included a new headworks building, where the water first enters the plant, new turbo compressors, electrical upgrades, a new lab for water testing, and more.

Stand has been working with MUB since the 1980s, Shelltio said.

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