Unpacking the Brazos River

Growth and water needs are colliding in Eastern Williamson County. We’re unpacking a series of projects ongoing to secure a sustainable water future for the entire region. Learn about the bottlenecks, dealing with 112-degree water, and the radical idea of storing water in underground “bubbles.”

Unpacking the Brazos River is a podcast by the Brazos River Authority. Share your thoughts, questions, and ideas for podcast episodes you’d like to hear about at information@brazos.org.
 
Host: Charlie L. Shugart, BRA assistant public information officer.
Guests: Brad Brunett, BRA Chief Operations Officer, and Mandy Cullar, BRA program manager.
Intro music: Clay Sellers, BRA lab analyst. 
 
About us: 
The Brazos River Authority was created by the Texas Legislature in 1929 and was the first state agency in the United States created specifically for the purpose of developing and managing the water resources of an entire river basin. Today, the BRA's staff of 284 develop and distribute water supplies, provide water and wastewater treatment, monitor water quality, and pursue water conservation through public education programs. Although the Brazos River Authority is an agency of the State of Texas, it does not levy or collect taxes. Except for occasional governmental grants to help pay the costs of specific projects, the BRA is entirely self-supporting. The BRA maintains and operates its reservoirs and treatment systems using revenues from the customers it serves.

Creators and Guests

Host
Charlie L. Shugart
BRA assistant public information officer
Guest
Brad Brunett
BRA chief operations officer
Guest
Mandy Cullar
BRA program manager

What is Unpacking the Brazos River?

Ready to unpack the powerful stories of a Texas titan - the Brazos River? Listen as experts explain the Brazos River Basin's immense role in our daily lives. They'll cover everything from the river's fascinating history to all the work that goes into ensuring you have water when you turn on your faucet.

Hear invaluable insights on topics like why lake levels change, the important projects safeguarding our water, the many species that call the Brazos home, and even some tips for enjoying the water from Brazos River Authority experts.

This is your chance to understand the immense work that goes into developing, managing, and protecting the Brazos River Basin, which stretches from the Texas-New Mexico border to the Gulf. (The basin is the size of Tennessee, y’all, it’s big.)

It’s a huge part of our state’s story and we can’t wait to share it with you.

Clay Sellers:

Got questions about the Brazos? No more unknowns. Ever wonder where that water comes from or where it goes? We're Unpacking the Brazos River.

Charlie Shugart:

Communities along the Brazos River are growing at a record pace, with new families and businesses arriving all the time. But with all this growth comes a huge question: Will there be enough water to go around? It's not just a problem for the future. It's a challenge we're facing right now, especially in places like Eastern Williamson County. This area is seeing explosive growth, and that means a much bigger demand for water.

Charlie Shugart:

How does one ensure there's enough water for everyone? Let's find out. Today we're talking about how the Brazos River Authority is working to make sure there's enough water for this region, not just for today, but for generations to come. I'm Charlie Shugart, and I'm with our public information office, and this is Unpacking the Brazos River. Joining me today for the second time on our podcast is Brad Brunett, BRA chief operations officer. So glad to have you back.

Brad Brunett:

Thank you. Good to be here again.

Charlie Shugart:

And for the first time, we're joined by program manager Mandy Cullar Thanks for joining us.

Mandy Cullar:

Thanks for having me, Charlie.

Charlie Shugart:

So tell us a little bit about your history with the BRA.

Mandy Cullar:

I started with the BRA about fifteen years ago, and I actually started in a wastewater lab. So water quality has always been, like, really integral to what I've done at the BRA. And I've been really, really fortunate to have a lot of opportunity for growth within the organization. And so, ultimately, you know, that got me to where I'm at, which is overseeing infrastructure projects.

Mandy Cullar:

Awesome. Great.

Charlie Shugart:

Well, we appreciate you being here.

Mandy Cullar:

Thanks.

Charlie Shugart:

So if you're familiar with the BRA, depending on where you're located in the Brazos River Basin, your understanding of what our organization does can depend on, for example, where you live or your needs. Some of those who live on Lakes Possum Kingdom, Granbury, and Limestone think of us just as owners of those water supply reservoirs. If you're a municipality in the lower portion of the basin like Hutto, Sugar Land, or Richwood, you may know us because we operate your wastewater treatment plants.

Charlie Shugart:

And if you live in the East Williamson County area, you may know us for water treatment. So that brings us back to today's topic. What is our involvement in water treatment?

Brad Brunett:

So, yeah, I guess I can take that one, Charlie. The East Williamson County regional water system that we operate today, got involved with that back in 2004, I think. We originally purchased a water plant from the city of Taylor. And our thinking back then, we kind of foresaw the growth that was coming to Williamson County. Back then, it wasn't near as rapid as what we're experiencing today, but we saw the need for a regional water treatment system there to serve that eastern part of Williamson County.

Brad Brunett:

And so we purchased the plant from the city of Taylor to turn it into a regional system. In about 2006, 2008 time frame, we expanded it from about four and a half million gallons per day, which is what it was when we purchased it, up to roughly 13,000,000 gallons per day. And, we've since constructed a number of other improvements. We put in a new intake structure that makes the the water supply more drought resilient where we can access water in the lake if it gets lower. We put in backup generators to ensure that we can operate the plant with power outages and those kind of things.

Brad Brunett:

And once we bought the facility from the city of Taylor, they were the original customer, but since then, we've added two others. So right now, we serve three wholesale customers from that facility. It's the city of Taylor, the Jonah Water Special Utility District, and the Lone Star Regional Water Authority. And each of those entities supplies water not only to their direct areas, but some of them supply water to additional customers like the city of Taylor has a small contract with Hutto for some of that water. And the Jonah Special Water Utility District is a a rural water district.

Brad Brunett:

They have a very large footprint, and so they supply a broad geographic area. And the Lone Star Regional Water Authority does as well. Their territory goes back up north on Interstate 35 up through the the Jarrell area all the way up to Bell County.

Charlie Shugart:

Can you give us a little bit of overview of what water treatment is like? Why are we treating water? Why can't we just take it straight from the river or lake and provide it straight to people?

Mandy Cullar:

There are physical contaminants in your water. There are biological contaminants, chemical contaminants potentially, and then organic matter in your water. So treatment really helps to remove or reduce a majority of those things. And then obviously, the disinfection process makes it safe to drink so that we're not you know, you're not gonna get sick from your drinking water.

Charlie Shugart:

Can you tell us how long a process like that takes?

Mandy Cullar:

I think it depends on the demands. When we're feeding water through the plant, there's specific detention times that have to be met in order to provide adequate treatment. We could be in a situation where if we're running at maximum capacity, the water's literally coming in, being treated, and going immediately out.

Brad Brunett:

Right. I would say one to two days if we're operating at a high capacity from the time the water comes in till it goes out. On any given day, if we pump the water out of the lake into the terminal storage lake, it's just like a smaller lake located at the plant. So we pump the water from Lake Granger into that terminal storage, and it holds about 20,000,000 gallons total. And if our plant is operating at peak capacity like we were, not necessarily this summer, but the summer of 2024, we were up around 13,000,000 gallons per day.

Brad Brunett:

This terminal storage reservoir holds 20. We were using 13, so that's, you know, less than two days worth of water in that terminal storage. And so that's where I was coming up with the one to two days that it would take for a drop of water once it got to terminal storage to to go through the system and be treated and pumped to the customers.

Charlie Shugart:

Are you able to provide any sort of analogy of how much water that is?

Brad Brunett:

On a peak day, if we're producing 13,000,000 gallons a day of water and sending that to the customers, that's the equivalent of about 40 acre feet of water. And one acre foot is about a football field covered one foot deep in water. So picture 40 football fields, one foot deep in water. That's about how much water we're putting out on a peak day.

Charlie Shugart:

Yeah. That's a lot.

Brad Brunett:

It's a lot, but it's all relative. You know, when you look at smaller communities, it's much less. If you look at a large system like, you know, say, you know, the city of Austin, City of Dallas, that's very small.

Charlie Shugart:

Right. Okay.

Brad Brunett:

It's just it's relative to the size. And I think in terms of the number of customers that take our water, this is a a pretty rough estimate, but it's probably somewhere between fifty and seventy thousand people are served from this system.

Charlie Shugart:

So we're doing an expansion project here at this plant. Before we dive into what that looks like, why? Why are we looking to expand this?

Brad Brunett:

Well, it's basically providing water to meet people's everyday needs. You know, we all here in this country enjoy the benefit, and sometimes we take it for granted that when we turn on the faucet, water comes out, clean water. And for the most part, other than maybe extreme droughts, we're not limited on our water. And it's important for the area so that that can continue so that, you know, people continue to have a clean, reliable supply of water knowing that when they turn that faucet on, there's gonna be clean water coming out.

Mandy Cullar:

We're seeing really unprecedented growth, population, and industrial growth in Williamson County and particularly in East Williamson County. So that's really the driving factor here.

Brad Brunett:

When we bought the plant from the city of Taylor, we expanded it quickly, as I mentioned earlier, from, you know, 2004 up until probably maybe maybe right before COVID in 2020, our water needs and use from the plant were increasing very gradually. It was just, you know, relatively stable. But since, about 2020, we've seen more of an exponential increase. You know, we've gone from a peak use of maybe seven or 8,000,000 gallons per day prior to 2020 to 13,000,000 gallons per day over that five or six year period. And so, you know, we're at the point now where our plan is pretty much maxed out, and we're having to do the expansion to meet those growing needs.

Charlie Shugart:

Did something happen in 2020 to spur a bigger jump than the gradual increase that was happening?

Brad Brunett:

It was somewhere around that time that the Samsung semiconductor chip facility or the I said semiconductor, it's a chip facility. I don't know if they're exactly the same, but it was somewhere about that time that was announced. And, you know, once that was announced, the area was already growing. Williamson County with Round Rock and Georgetown, those areas are growing, you know, outward and expanding to the East, so we were already starting to see some of that.

Brad Brunett:

And then with the Samsung facility, that kinda kicked things into another gear in terms of, you know, that major infrastructure development coming in and all the people that were gonna be needed to build it, to support it, support companies that are gonna be needed to provide, you know, materials or supplies or support to that overall facility. And so that to me is kind of the trigger of when we really start saw things starting to increase was after that announcement was made. And I wanna say it. I'm trying to remember. It was around 2020, I think.

Brad Brunett:

One thing that's important for people to know, the water for the facility at Samsung is gonna be coming from groundwater through a pipeline that goes about 20 miles east of our plant. So they're not getting water for Samsung directly from the BRA because, frankly, couldn't get the plant expanded fast enough and be able to supply all the water that they need without putting our customers in jeopardy of of getting water to people's homes on a day to day basis. And so the expansions that we're talking about aren't to supply the facility itself. It's to supply all of the people that are coming to the area partly in result of the facility.

Charlie Shugart:

So let's talk about the expansion. How do you expand a plant? What does that look like?

Mandy Cullar:

So when we talk about the East Williamson County plant expansion, we're really looking at it as a system expansion. And so there are kind of four main components that we looked at expanding. So the first thing that we looked at was some type of immediate boost to our production capacity, which we got through rerating the existing plant capacity. So when we did that, we hired an engineering firm. They came in and they really tried to pinpoint efficiencies of where we could get a more efficient, productive treatment process with very minimal cost and impact to operation.

Mandy Cullar:

Right? And so they were able to successfully do that, and that actually boosted our plant capacity from around 13 MGD up to 14.5 MGD just by tweaking our treatment process.

Charlie Shugart:

Okay. So it didn't really involve, like, construction or building new work. It

Mandy Cullar:

That's correct. It was more of an administrative exercise. There was, some water quality studies that had to be done within the plant itself during the treatment process. But then outside of that, it's really administrative with TCEQ.

Charlie Shugart:

Yeah. And that's the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Mandy Cullar:

That's right.

Charlie Shugart:

So what difference did that make?

Mandy Cullar:

So it gave us it boosted our treatment capacity about 1.5 MGD. So it gave us that kind of a little initial boost to, in the very near short term, increase our treatment capacity so we can get more water to our customers.

Brad Brunett:

One of the reasons we did that was because we could do it relatively quickly, whereas some of the other stuff Mandy's gonna talk about the other three phases take more time. And had we not done that rerating this summer and especially last summer, we would have been probably in maybe stage two or three of our drought contingency plan where we would have been restricting water use by our customers just because the plant couldn't keep up on those hot summer days. And so I mentioned earlier that we've maxed out at about 13. I think it's a slightly a little bit less than that, but our drought plan for the plant has trigger levels that once we get to, let's say, 85% of the max capacity for three days in a row, we go to stage one. If we get to within 90% for three days in a row, we go to stage two.

Brad Brunett:

And had we not added this extra one and a half, it doesn't sound like a lot, but adding that one and a half has allowed us to pretty much not have to implement our drought contingency plan for the plant because its capacity has been adequate to to take care of people's use without doing that.

Charlie Shugart:

You mentioned last summer and really the summer before that the demand was so high. Why was the demand so high?

Brad Brunett:

It primarily has to do with rainfall. So this summer in 2025, we've enjoyed a lot of rain through the summer, especially back in July. And, typically, our plants use or produce a lot more water in the summertime because in the summertime, that's when people are watering their grass, You know, more car washing, more just more water use in general. And just for comparison, in the summertime, many times your peak water use will be more than double what it is, say, in January or February. And so this summer, we had a lot of rainfall, and so people didn't need to water as much, and that resulted in less water coming from the plant.

Brad Brunett:

Last summer in 2024, it was much drier, particularly toward the end of the summer, and people were using more water mainly for probably outdoor irrigation and landscapes type stuff. It's kinda two separate drought plans for that area. Number one, looking at do we have enough water in the lake? And number two, do we have enough treatment capacity to treat what our customers need?

Charlie Shugart:

And I don't think we mentioned this. Lake Granger isn't a BRA reservoir. So how does that work?

Brad Brunett:

So right. It's a Corps of Engineers reservoir, and the Brazos River Authority has contracts with the Corps to store water in eight of their reservoirs in the Brazos River Basin. And so, essentially, the way that it works is the water supply component of Lake Granger and all the other core reservoirs that we contract for, BRA is in control of water supply. The Corps of Engineers is in control of flood control. So when we have big rains in the lake, like Lake Granger rises up above its normal level into the flood pool, the Corps is responsible for managing how they release that floodwater and when.

Brad Brunett:

When the lake is at its normal level or below. The Brazos River Authority has the contractual right with the Corps and then the state water rights from the state to supply that water to our customers.

Charlie Shugart:

Okay. So we talked about the rerating of the plant. What's the next step? What is another project for this?

Mandy Cullar:

So as it stands currently, water that's treated at East Williamson County, comes from Lake Granger. So that's all surface water. We have a well that is in the Trinity Aquifer that's on-site, on our facility, and the goal is to take that groundwater, cool it, disinfect it, and blend it with the treated surface water. So that's gonna add some additional capacity that we can deliver to our customers without actually having to expand the treatment plant itself. So it's almost two two separate trains of water that are gonna be combined into one for delivery.

Charlie Shugart:

So have we not been using water from the Trinity Aquifer before?

Mandy Cullar:

It was constructed within the last five years, but we have not gotten to a point with our studies with the blending that we're comfortable incorporating that water, but that we're getting to that point now where in the fairly near future, in the next year or so, we're gonna start to kind of blend some of that water with our surface water.

Brad Brunett:

I think we drilled that well, probably maybe six or seven years ago. And we drilled it because we had known back then that at some point, there's not gonna be enough water in Lake Granger to take care of all the needs when we have a bad drought. So we looked at the groundwater in the area, and we determined that it it was, you know, feasible and a cost effective strategy to be able to use a little bit of groundwater to add to our surface water to increase our overall supply. But back when we drilled the well, we really didn't need it yet because there's still plenty of water in Lake Granger. And even today, there's still plenty of water in Lake Granger.

Brad Brunett:

What's driving us to do this phase two part of the project now, again, is the treatment capacity of the plant. We're about maxed out there, and we can implement this groundwater well more quickly and and let more cost effective than we can expanding the plant. So it's kind of the right time now to begin doing it. We really didn't need it. We went ahead and had the foresight to drill the well so that, you know, we didn't totally get behind the eight ball and have to rush, rush, rush.

Brad Brunett:

We've got the well there, and we've done some testing. And that's one of the other things that with groundwater, really don't know what's down there until you drill the well, until you, you know, exercise it and test it. And so we've got a good well, and it's just now is the time when we need to pull the trigger to implement the infrastructure to start using it.

Charlie Shugart:

Do we use groundwater anywhere else in the basin?

Brad Brunett:

No. That's the only location. Yes. And we may end up drilling some more wells, in the future. So, out there, particularly there, not necessarily in other parts of the basin.

Brad Brunett:

We're not focused on that, but this project at East Williamson County contemplates several additional wells into the future as our water needs grow.

Charlie Shugart:

Okay. Okay. So you mentioned that this water need to be blended. Why? Why does the water need to be

Mandy Cullar:

Partly because of water quality differences. You know, this well is approximately 3,300 feet deep, and the water comes out very warm. It has a lot of total dissolved solids. And so those things make the water unpalatable. And so by diluting it with surface water, which has, you know, is a little bit cleaner tasting, has better taste and odor qualities, it allows our customers to see maybe less of an impact to their water quality.

Mandy Cullar:

And, ideally, they won't notice at all. So that that's our ultimate goal is to to make it so we can supplement the surface water with little impact to the end user.

Charlie Shugart:

Yeah. You mentioned that the water coming out of the well is warm. What are we talking about?

Mandy Cullar:

It's about a 112 degrees Fahrenheit.

Charlie Shugart:

Wow.

Mandy Cullar:

Give or take a few degrees. Right? So so it feels like a nice warm hot tub coming out.

Mandy Cullar:

And yeah, so that's, you know, integral to the incorporation of groundwater is kind of cooling things down. And when we go to talk a little bit more about what that infrastructure and what that project really looks like, Cooling towers is probably the biggest component we're gonna see, which is really evaporative towers that are designed to cool the water so we can disinfect it properly.

Charlie Shugart:

Oh, wow. Okay. So the water has to be a certain temperature before you can disinfect it.

Mandy Cullar:

Yeah. They like to get it down into the eighties.

Charlie Shugart:

Wow. Okay.

Mandy Cullar:

And we're told those cooling towers are gonna get it into the the sweet spot. Right?

Charlie Shugart:

Nice.

Brad Brunett:

One of the other things, Charlie, with the groundwater that that we're looking at out there is a new relatively new idea that's being more and more implemented in this country. It's been used elsewhere for quite a while, and, it's being used here in Texas now in two or three locations and some other locations in Florida. And it's called aquifer storage and recovery where we basically will take extra water from Lake Granger when it's not needed by our customers, run it through the treatment plant, clean it up, and then potentially inject it into the ground to store it underground for use later on. And we've done quite a bit of preliminary work out there and have determined that it looks like it's a feasible project for that location. The aquifer characteristics are conducive for allowing it to work.

Brad Brunett:

And so that's something else that I think we're gonna test and explore some more as well. So in addition to using this well to blend the the native groundwater that's in the ground underneath their feet out there right now, in the future, we may look at taking extra water out of Lake Granger, you know, such as we've had this summer when we've had extra water in the lakes in the flood pool, treat that water and store it in the ground. And that's putting really and truly cleaner water into the ground than what exists naturally there. And if you think about it in locations where it works, you create almost like a bubble of water underneath the ground. So the more water you're at you add, you're expanding this underground bubble of water.

Brad Brunett:

And then, you know, let's say we do that for five or ten years, we're gradually and incrementally putting more and more water there and then we have a really bad drought like 2011 and the lake gets low, we can pull more of that clean water out of the ground and use it. So that's something that it's still not a 100% that we're gonna do that and that it's gonna work there, but we are looking at at getting permits from TCEQ to test that and take the next step because all the preliminary work and the desktop analysis that's been done indicate we've got a really good spot for that.

Charlie Shugart:

You mentioned the bubble. How exactly do you store water underground?

Brad Brunett:

Most aquifers like the Trinity Aquifer are basically just layers of underground sand, and they have pore spaces in between the sand particles.

Charlie Shugart:

OK.

Brad Brunett:

And so those pore spaces hold a lot of water when you're talking about maybe a sand layer that's 500 feet thick and, you know, may run, like, you know, laterally for, you know, miles or across multiple counties. And so those pore spaces hold water and depending on the aquifer, water naturally moves through aquifers. All the water that's in the aquifers today actually came as rainwater. It fell on the ground somewhere, soaked into the ground, and gradually percolates through the ground. And so some of those aquifers that water moves really fast, most of them it moves really slow.

Brad Brunett:

And for ASR to work, you want it to move really slow because if you're putting water down your well, building this bubble, you may not need it for years. And so you want the bubble to still be here and not downstream underground somewhere twenty years from now. So again, that's kinda how it works with this situation in this aquifers. The Trinity Aquifer is very deep. It's over 3,000 feet deep and the water moves very slowly.

Brad Brunett:

And so by injecting clean water, like I said, you know, the best way I can describe it is just like if you are slowly blowing a balloon up, you know, you're creating this balloon or bubble of water if you will in the aquifer. And around the edges of that bubble, there'll be some mixing with the native groundwater. And so you'll have this zone where the water characteristics are kinda like the native and kinda like the clean. But the closer you get to the center of the bubble, it's gonna be more like the the clean water that you put down there.

Charlie Shugart:

Why would we treat the water before putting it below ground?

Brad Brunett:

Most aquifers naturally treat the water so it falls as rainwater. You know, all the water that's in the aquifers, you know, fell as rainwater somewhere and it was totally clean. And, you know, say it hits the ground and it may get some contaminants from, you know, animal poop or oil or whatever, but as it as it percolates through the ground, the ground's naturally filtering it. So most of the water that's in our aquifers is clean water except for natural contaminants like salts and things. You know, there's there's natural salt formations within the the rocks and things that dissolve into it.

Brad Brunett:

But in in terms of other contaminant, it's it's usually relatively clean other than just natural things. When we're taking water out of the lake, our lake water, you know, it's it's relatively clean. You know, we go swimming, we water ski on it, and those kind of things. But it could still have some nasty stuff in there that's nast ier than what's in the ground. And so with ASR, there are protections in place that require us to treat it so that we don't take nasty water out of a lake and put it into the ground and then contaminate water that was otherwise already pretty good.

Charlie Shugart:

Wow. Okay. That's really interesting. I love that. Okay.

Charlie Shugart:

So we did rerating at the plant. We're looking at blending. What's the next step for that?

Mandy Cullar:

Well, I think it's important to say that all of these things from a project standpoint are really developing simultaneously. So we're working on there are four kind of separate components to the system expansion, and all of those are being worked simultaneously, but they are on different schedules.

Charlie Shugart:

Sure, and we're just talking about them

Mandy Cullar:

We're talking about them one at a time and maybe in order of priority actually. So the next part of that is a treated water pipeline, well an additional treated water pipeline.

Mandy Cullar:

So once the water is treated at the plant, we have currently a 27 inch pipeline that runs from our plant facility to our customer take points in Circleville. So Circleville is on 95 outside of Taylor, and that's about 3.7 miles. It's about 3.7 miles. And so we have one pipeline currently. We're limited in capacity because it's only a 27 inches pipeline.

Mandy Cullar:

And so this is gonna allow us to put in a redundant pipeline, but also a much larger pipeline. So

Charlie Shugart:

What does a redundant pipeline mean?

Mandy Cullar:

Yeah. So that just means instead of having one, we're gonna have two that are running simultaneously, but can also be somewhat interchangeable. So if one of them needs to be taken down for maintenance, we kind of have a backup to use.

Mandy Cullar:

Right? This new pipeline is gonna be much larger diameter, and it's gonna really meet our needs until we get to the max buildup of that facility. So it's gonna meet our needs all the way all the way into the future until we have to buy build a whole new facility. So when it comes to the easement acquisition process for the for the pipeline, we're working really closely with the potentially impacted landowners. And, you know, the BRA thinks it's really important to be a good neighbor, and and we're trying to do that.

Charlie Shugart:

Yeah. I love that. Okay.

Mandy Cullar:

So the 27 inch pipeline, the current capacity is about 16,000,000 gallons per day. This new pipeline is going to be greater than 54,000,000 gallons per day, so that's gonna meet our needs. I mean, our final build out for the entire system expansion is going to be around that 54, a little bit maybe a little bit more than 54 MGD. We're that's to be determined.

Brad Brunett:

And I think Mandy mentioned earlier, we're working all these all four of these projects simultaneously, but this one, the pipeline is a priority because right now we've got that bottleneck. If we expanded the plant where we could treat let's say we could treat 30,000,000 gallons of water every day at the plant, we couldn't get it to the customers because the pipeline that it's got to flow through can only hold about can only flow about 16. So the pipeline expansion is the next most important thing because, like I said, it doesn't do you any good to expand your expand your plant where you can treat all this water if you don't have a pipeline to to be capable of sending it to the customers. And so That's why it's next on the list, if you will, beyond the the blending and the rerating that we've already talked about.

Mandy Cullar:

So they're currently working on the 60% design.

Charlie Shugart:

What's that mean?

Mandy Cullar:

The way our projects work at the BRA is typically we do a preliminary engineering phase. After that, we go into a design phase, and then we go into construction. So we're currently in the design phase, which is where our engineer really puts the final touches on their final design of this is what we're actually going to build. And we kind of have three major milestones within that design phase. We typically get a 30% design, 60% design, and either a 90 or 95% design, depending on the project.

Mandy Cullar:

And then, of course, a 100%. Right? The 100% is all done and ready to go. We're ready to build this thing. And so we're kind of right in the middle for this particular component, the pipeline component.

Mandy Cullar:

So we're making really good progress there.

Charlie Shugart:

So with this expansion project, we have the rerating, the blending, the new pipeline. You mentioned four, so what's next? Or part of at the same time.

Mandy Cullar:

Yeah. Yeah. So kind of the fourth component that we're looking at is an actual treatment plant expansion. So we're gonna really expand our capacity, our treatment capacity at the plant itself. And so really the infrastructure we're looking to add there is going to be new clarifiers, new filters, ground storage so we can store a little bit more of the treated water and have that available for our customers.

Brad Brunett:

You know, with regard to the treatment process, there's several main phases of that. When the water comes from the lake, it goes into that terminal storage reservoir that we talked about earlier that holds it's just like a small lake. And then, there's some settling that occurs in that terminal storage reservoir. Some of the the particles and sediment settle out there. But from there, the water goes into clarifiers and those are, you know, a big component of what we're gonna need to enlarge and expand.

Brad Brunett:

And in those clarifiers, we add some chemicals and other things to help cause the big particles that are still in the water to coagulate and join together, and then they settle out to the bottom and and we get rid of that as sludge so the water's a little clearer.

Charlie Shugart:

Alright.

Brad Brunett:

Then we send it to filters, and these filters are big basins that are full of different types of sand layers, and the water flows through those just like I was talking about with underground aquifers. The natural soil in the earth purifies water as it flows through. And so we have these sand filters there at the plant that filter out some more of the nasty stuff. And then once the water goes through the clarifiers to the sand filters, the last phase is disinfection and we add something like chlorine or something like that to kill any, you know, microorganisms or whatever that's still in there.

Brad Brunett:

And then from there, goes to what we call our clear well storage where it's basically the water's treated and ready to go and it's a big tank where we hold it before it gets pumped through that pipeline.

Charlie Shugart:

Okay.

Brad Brunett:

And so this last phase of the expansion, we'll be looking at expanding all of those components, the clarifiers, the filtration capacity, and the storage in a clear well.

Mandy Cullar:

The plant expansion itself is going to happen in two phases. So right now, we're kind of in the short term expansion phase, which is gonna boost our capacity to around 30 MGD, treatment capacity, and that's scheduled to be completed around 2028. After that, we're gonna start looking at timing for the long term expansion, which is gonna give us that final build out for that facility.

Brad Brunett:

And that's gonna be dictated by demand. So I mentioned earlier, currently, we're maxing out at about 13. The short term expansion that Mandy just mentioned is gonna get us up to around 30 MGD when you look at the the, groundwater blending, the rerate, and the new expansion all put together. It's gonna be about 30. So that's more than double than we have right now.

Brad Brunett:

2028 is now, you know, two and a half, three years away. And so once we get there, we'll see what our demands really have been. If they're going faster than we think, then we may have to start the planning for that next expansion quickly. If things moderate and, you know, we get to 2028 and we're only at 17 MGD and we've got 30, then, you know, we'll wait until the time is right to start that last one because it costs money to do all of this. And you don't wanna do it too early because you burden the customers and the rate payers with the cost before they need it.

Brad Brunett:

You don't wanna do it too late because then you're you're late and people aren't getting the water. And so the next or final phase of the build out for the facility will kinda be dictated based on what we see in the growth in the population over the next five to ten years.

Charlie Shugart:

Yeah. Well, a huge thank you, Brad, Mandy, for joining us today. I'm so glad you're able to come on and help kinda break this down for everybody.

Mandy Cullar:

Thanks for having me.

Brad Brunett:

You're welcome.

Charlie Shugart:

So if while listening, you have a follow-up question or something more you'd like to learn about, please reach out. You can, email us at information@Brazos.org. We're happy to fill in any gaps. And if you, have a topic you'd like to learn more about within the Brazos River Basin, whether it's water supply, conservation, or reservoirs, water treatment, anything, please feel free. Information at brazos.org.

Charlie Shugart:

And with that, we're out. Join us next time on Unpacking the Brazos River.