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Chris Harder – Water Director, Fort Worth Water

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.

Michael Brooks – Project Manager, Texas Water Development Board

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 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 drier, 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.

Chris Harder – Water Director, Fort Worth Water

In terms of the financing, the total interest charge on this loan was below market and just an outstanding value for our ratepayers. 

Gyna Bivens – Mayor Pro Tem, City of Fort Worth

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.