Kennedy Jenks (KJ) recently completed a three-year grant-funded project titled “Reinventing Wastewater Treatment Plants: Energy Neutral Treatment and Enhanced Fertilizer Production through a Novel Resource Recovery Center” as the Principal Investigator (PI) prime institution. This project was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO), Award Number DE-EE0009495, as part of the DOE’s Water Security Grand Challenge. The grant program tests pilot-ready technology and innovation to meet the global need for safe, secure, and affordable water.
Wastewater treatment plants have traditionally focused on reducing environmental discharges. For decades, improvements targeted process optimization to meet increasingly stringent permit limits. More recently, the emphasis has shifted to recovery of valuable nutrient resources and reducing energy usage, while achieving the same level of treatment. This project focused on reducing energy demand for secondary treatment at municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) by at least 50%, increasing anaerobic digester (AD) biogas and ammonia production by 100% and 120%, respectively, and recovering 90% of ammonia from the AD by using:
- A cloth media filter (CMF) instead of primary clarifiers to capture and divert more carbon and ammonia to anaerobic digesters (AD).
- AD as an intermediate step to produce more biogas and to generate a centrate stream containing higher ammonia concentration.
- Membrane evaporation (ME) technology to recover ammonia from the centrate and produce fertilizer.
If implemented at a national scale, a CMF-AD-ME system shows potential to reduce national electrical energy demand by an estimated 8.6 TWh/yr – about 5.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide – and increase biogas production by around 90 billion ft3/yr.
KJ was recognized by the Colorado School of Mines Foundation as a MINES@150 Visionary for this project’s support of sponsored research at the School of Mines via the DOE grant. This grant supported several faculty members and graduate research. The Visionaries Society was created to recognize organizations that have committed $1 million or more to support the future of Mines through the MINES@150 campaign. The campaign launched during the pandemic in 2020 and closed in June 2025. KJ is proud to be included as a MINES@150 Visionary as part of the school’s 150th anniversary. Visionaries are included on a celebratory plaque in the Green Center at School of Mines.
The project team included Colorado School of Mines, Aqua Aerobics (as the technology partner), Baylor University, and Arizona State University. The project was conducted at two sites: the Mines Park Water Reclamation Station in Golden, CO, and the South Platte Water Renewal Partners’ 25 MGD WWTP in Englewood, CO.
The grant was originally proposed by the late Dr. Ryan Holloway, who was an engineer in the Applied Research Group in KJ. The KJ team included Leila Sermek as principal investigator, Gavi Subramanian, and Katia Ito. Katia’s master’s thesis was a product of this project while she was in the graduate program at Mines. Project Manager Ron Walz, and Daniel Susanto and Sausha Allen from accounting and billing, supported the project.
About Kennedy Jenks
Kennedy Jenks is a leading water and environmental engineering and environmental sciences firm that serves public agencies and private-sector clients with over 500 employees nationwide. The employee-owned firm delivers innovative design, construction, and technology solutions for water and environmental projects across the United States.
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