High Pressure Fire Loop water conservation happens one drop at a time
One of Pantex’s pump houses holds approximately 400,000 gallons of water. The conservation efforts on this pump house are saving 185,000 gallons of water per month.
Water is a precious commodity, especially in the Texas Panhandle, and actions taken to conserve water will impact future generations for years to come. At Pantex, the Environmental Compliance department focuses on a Department of Energy sustainability goal to reduce the overall annual water use.
“For the last few years, we tried to focus on finding projects that can be done easily to conserve water,” said Environmental Compliance Manager Alicia Barley. “We identified several different projects and have focused on the High-Pressure Fire Loop (HPFL) specifically for a while.”
Pantex has two water distribution systems: the domestic water system and the HPFL system. The HPFL system is made up of three pump facilities and approximately 20 miles of underground distribution piping, providing a dedicated water supply to fire protection suppression systems (also known as fire sprinkler systems) across the plant. In addition to being on standby to support fire suppression systems in a fire event, the HPFL also provides means to conduct various fire system maintenance and testing activities.
Environmental Compliance’s focus on water conservation happened to coincide with an effort by the HPFL System Engineering team to reduce water usage while still meeting its daily operational demands. The team’s conservation efforts focus on making necessary system repairs and improvements to reduce the system’s water waste.
One of the conservation efforts put in place is to reduce the amount of process water used with operating the system’s maintenance support water pump. Any time the maintenance pump runs without flowing water to support maintenance activities, the pump discharges water to drain which prevents internal damage.
“Before the upgrades we made to the maintenance pump, we had to manually start and stop the pump each day, resulting in the pump running continuously all day, every day discharging a large amount of water to drain,” said Colton Mooney, HPFS system engineer. “Now, with the ability to remotely start and stop the pump, it can be specifically run when it is needed for maintenance activities. Thanks to the maintenance personnel and support from Facility Engineering, this improvement has resulted in an approximate 50% reduction (or an average of 185,000 gallons of water saved) per month just by utilizing the pump only when it is needed.”
The work the team is doing to conserve water becomes more important every year.
“We are seeing the climate change over time and we can expect longer seasons of drought,” Barley said. “Any time we can conserve water, we need to make it a priority.”
The HPFL water conservation efforts began several years ago when the team identified the need to measure the system’s leaks and to reduce the amount of water wasted to perform its own system inspection and testing requirements. In 2018, the HPFL was equipped with flow meters, which are used to measure the amount of water that is being lost from the system, providing the team with the ability to quantify its water losses within the distribution piping and supported fire systems.
“The average municipality leaks about 10% of their daily water usage,” Mooney said. “Our current leak rate on the HPFL is approximately 20 gallons per minute, which sounds like a lot, but considering the size of our system and all the fire systems we support, we actually have a very tight system. With the ability to measure the leak rate, we can now see issues and react.”
In addition to monitoring leaks, the HPFL team has future pump facility upgrade plans which will provide the team with the ability to recapture the water used and reduce the water needed to perform its required quarterly, annual, and 5-year inspections and tests.
“Right now, in order to perform our quarterly and annual requirements at all our pump facilities each year, we have to discharge a combined total of approximately 465,000 gallons of water to the ground. Every 5 years, we are required to conduct an internal tank inspection at each of our facilities,” Mooney explained. “With our facility improvements, we will have the ability to recapture all of the 465,000 gallons of water wasted annually. For the 5-year inspections, we’re looking into bringing in remotely operated vehicles or divers to conduct those inspections instead of draining the tanks.”
All Pantex employees can do their part to save the precious resource, one drop at a time. These changes are great steps forward to conserve water at the plant and move the facility closer to the DOE sustainability goal target of reducing water use intensity 50% by 2030 from the 2021 baseline.
Employees got an inside look at what makes the pump house work during a recent employee infrastructure tour.