Today is our grand opening
for the new biosolids dryer facility here in Fort Worth.
What it does is it takes the residuals from our wastewater
treatment plant process and converts them into a dried pellet
that looks almost like a commercial fertilizer.
That dry pellet can be used for a number of different methods,
whether it's as a fertilizer, residential fertilizer, commercial fertilizer.
It can be used as a soil amendment.
It can even be used as a biofuel.
A biosolids plant is part of a wastewater treatment plant
that takes the disinfected sludge from the plant
and then basically dries it out so that the end product
is lighter, easy to easier to move.
It's big.
A rotary drum dryer.
This this one is really big.
It's 14 and a half feet in diameter.
It's 52 feet long.
It's basically reinforced and insulated
so that the heat doesn't escape
from inside the drum.
And the biosolids basically rotate
in the bottom of the drum while it's turning so that they dry out quicker
since it's much dryer, they
can use a lot less trucks to transport it,
and it's more of a class A product
that can be sold easier to the public and to farmers that need it.
The project ended up costing
$59.1 million, which was under budget.
Well, the TWDB basically gave the city
a very low-interest loan through the clean
water development fund.
In terms of the financing,
the total interest charge on this loan was below market
and just an outstanding value for our ratepayers.
I want everybody to know that Fort Worth is on the cutting edge
of wastewater treatment projects.
And when you talk about biosolids and how nutrient-rich they are,
we are cutting edge.