Wyoming’s sewage treatment plants are showing their age.
They’re backed up with flushable wipes, leaking air necessary to help bacteria-eating bugs grow, and need millions of dollars in repairs.
Some are tapping loans from Wyoming’s Office of State Lands and Investments. Others have a rainy-day fund in reserves collected from ratepayers to pay for the unexpected.
Rocky Mountain Power, the electric utility owned by billionaire Warren Buffet’s PacifiCorp, is tossing some rope to help out these rural and sometimes forgotten plants through major rebates to help bring down their power costs, considered so expensive that they’ve become the top energy-guzzlers in many towns.
Rocky Mountain plans to give Laramie a rebate check for $210,000 — it’s biggest ever in Wyoming.
The energy efficiency upgrades will reduce the city’s electricity usage by the same amount of power consumed by over 200 homes and save the city over $100,000 annually in electricity costs.
Electric utility bills for wastewater treatment plants can range from Casper’s $300,000 a year charge for its population of 60,000, toTorrington’s $80,000 charge for a city one-eighth in size.
“They’re high intensity energy users for every community that has them,” said Clay Monroe, director of Rocky Mountain’s energy efficiency programs in Salt Lake City. “In some communities, the No. 1 or No. 2 energy using entity is their wastewater treatment plant.”
Wyoming’s complex sewage treatment plants come in all shapes and sizes, as well as technologies, and range from using lagoons to aerated concrete tanks to sift out bad bacteria in the wastewater before releasing it back into local rivers and streams, or spreading it as fertilizer in landfills.
It's a challenging time for the Cowboy State’s network of 118 permitted wastewater treatment facilities — some of which are run by cities too poor to patch them up.
A few years ago, after a torrential rainstorm, Torrington Water Utility Supervisor Tom Troxel noticed bubbles coming up from the ground and bursting near his sewage treatment plant in southeastern Wyoming.
They were mysterious at first glance, but a little bit of sleuthing on Troxel’s part came up with a problem that has cropped up not only at his plant, but several others across the Cowboy State.
Massive blowers that pump air to the bacteria-eating bugs in sewage tanks were pushing air into leaky and rusty underground pipes.
In the case of Torrington, workers dug up the bad section of eight-inch pipe and replaced it.
New gaskets in some of the pipelines also were replaced.
Without the air blowing into the aerator tanks holding sewage, the microbial bugs that eat the waste products won’t live long enough to do their job. The bugs’ lives are important in cutting down on bad bacteria.
Everything is so complicated with wastewater treatment plants that a technical manual is needed to figure it out.
Key to the process are the bugs.
During the waste treatment process, air is turned on at one of the plant’s complex of buildings to breathe life into the bugs. The bugs remove the phosphorus, nitrogen, sodium, potassium, iron, calcium and compounds such as fats, sugars and proteins.
Common bugs with fun names like “water bears” and “water fleas” perform different tasks, as do many other bacteria-fighting microorganisms.
An entire chart with many of these common sludge microorganisms hangs on the wall of the lab room of Laramie’s wastewater treatment plant, which is located at the end of Banner road to the west of the university town.
A Latin dictionary is needed to get a rough translation of where they fall in the hierarchy of bug-life.
The entrance to Laramie’s wastewater treatment plant off of Banner Road on the west side of town in the Laramie Plains area. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
Before the non-potable water is sent to the Laramie River, the treated water is hit with ultra-violet rays to kill as much bacteria as possible. Bill Schott, supervisor of the wastewater treatment plant for the cit of Laramie, watches over the process. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
Bill Schott, supervisor of the wastewater treatment plant for Laramie’s Public Works Department, stands at the point where the effluent comes out of the ground near the plant for the treated non-potable water. The stream meanders over the prairie grasslands two miles before emptying into the Laramie River. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
Bill Schott, supervisor at Laramie’s wastewater treatment plant, stands on a walkway to inspect a tank used in the separation of sludge. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily)
Go Bugs
Everyone should root for the bugs.
In Laramie, the effluent from the treatment plant winds its way over two miles of grassland pasture to the Laramie River.
The creek-like stream of effluent eventually dumps into the river, meanders downstream to Wheatland, which taps the river for its drinking water.
The effluent from Laramie’s plant generally flows north of the Bamforth National Wildlife Refuge along Interstate 80.
Moose, elk, pronghorn and waterfowl are regular visitors in the area. Buffalo and cattle from nearby ranches have occasionally been seen drinking from the channel of treated, non-potable water – which means that it hasn’t been treated to drinking water standards and is not meant for human consumption.
Similar effluent discharges are happening all over Wyoming.
Kemmerer releases its treated waste into the Hams Forks River, downstream from the spot where its water plant takes out water, while Casper empties its effluent through a 150-yard long pipe that ends at the North Platte River.
Signs of age are beginning to cripple Wyoming’s sewage treatment system. Some cities are in dire need of tens of millions of dollars to upgrade their systems.
Some are raising rates on septic tank dumps in the treatment plants to keep the system from overloading. That may push some waste dumpers to seek other ways of disposal.
“Wyoming needs a statewide evaluation of sewer treatment plants,” said State Sen. Anthony Bouchard, R-Cheyenne. Bouchard ran the Pump-It septic tank business for years.
Remember The Potholes
“Here’s what’s happening in Wyoming," Bouchard told Cowboy State Daily. "People have pet projects but they forget the potholes,” referring to infrastructure needs like aging sewage treatment plants.
“Somewhere, there’s a disconnect. There’s not enough money coming from the county and state,” he said.
He predicts that as treatment facilities age, officials will need to raise septic dump rates – which they already are doing in some municipalities.
Some septic tank companies may dump wastes in fields or elsewhere, Bouchard said.
He cited soaring costs in Cheyenne as an example.
In 2010, a septic tank company like Bouchard’s would pay $8 per 100 gallons of septic tank waste dumped at Cheyenne’s sewage wastewater treatment plant near Campstool Road. The cost jumped to $11.58 in 2023 and another 10% hike in January to $12.74.
“The county is overloaded and is turning away septic tanks,” Bouchard said “There is nowhere to dump.”
Septic trucks have different load capacities, and can range in size from 1,200 to 2,500 gallons, or larger. Based on the Cheyenne charges, septic tank trucks can pay anywhere from $152.88 to $318.50 per load.
Matt Buelow, water reclamation division manager for Cheyenne, said that he hasn’t heard of the issues raised by Bouchard.
“We’ve got a good group of haulers. To me, this is not a concern,” said Beulow, whose Crow Creek and Dry Creek treatment plants south of Cheyenne use state-of-the-art mechanical processes, though relies on 20-year-old blower technology to keep its bugs alive. The older blowers may get replaced in the near future with a package of $3 million worth of new blowers and other equipment, he said.
The city’s power bills are ranging between $40,000 and $50,000 for each of the plants, which could get lowered by a fifth with new blower upgrades.
Beulow said that the hikes in septic tank rates have been driven largely by rising power bills. “It’s the cost of doing business.”
Repair Mode
Meanwhile, sewage treatment plants across the state are hunkering down to fix things.
In late April, the city of Green River awarded a $51.3 million contract to Salt Lake City-based Boswell Construction to build a replacement to the southeastern Wyoming city’s aging lagoon treatment system.
Green River's nearly 60-year-old wastewater treatment system currently violates U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards with each discharge into the nearby Green River.
In Kemmerer, where TerraPower is building a Natrium nuclear demonstration reactor, the city is eyeing a huge bill to tidy things up at the local sewage treatment plant, and maybe build a replacement.
With over 10,000 workers expected to come to the Kemmerer area to work on TerraPower, and other energy projects on the drawing board, the city may not be able to handle the population influx.
Kemmerer's sewage wastewater treatment plant is 42 years old, and is likely to need replacement as part of a $40 million to $60 million improvement to the region’s sewage treatment needs, said Brent McClarnon, superintendent of the Kemmerer-Diamondville Water & Wastewater Joint Powers Board.
The plant should have been replaced a quarter century ago but has been kept together through replacement of pumps and mechanical parts to keep it operating along the Hams Fork River, that zigzags through Kemmerer.
The Torrington Water Utility is in the midst of an $8 million upgrade on the wastewater treatment plant’s headworks facility, as is seen above. Such a facility removes trash and debris at the beginning of the treatment process. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
One of the biggest problems that a wastewater treatment must contend with are the flushable wipes that can sometimes clog up the system. Above, flushable wipes hang from the center pipe on a lagoon pond that was drained to clean them out at a plant in Torrington, Wyoming. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
The hole in the floor behind Bill Schott, supervisor for the Laramie wastewater treatment plant, is where the sewage from throughout the city comes together before the treatment process begins. Schott sometimes checks to make sure that the sewage is coming into the plant by pushing off the cover to see if things are swirling around. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
A separator behind Bill Schott, supervisor for Laramie’s wastewater treatment plant, keeps large objects from moving through the treatment process at the Banner Road facility. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
On left, Bill Schott, supervisor for Laramie’s wastewater treatment plant, and Mark Hazelnut, civil engineer at the plant, stand in front of blowers recently installed as part of a $7.2 million project. The energy-guzzling blowers are used to pump air to an aerating tank where bacteria-eating bugs need the oxygen to breakdown wastes. The city hopes to cut its power bill by a third at the plant with the new efficient pumps. Wyoming’s electric utility Rocky Mountain Power is expected to pay the city a $210,000 rebate for cutting down on power usage at the plant. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
Laramie’s wastewater treatment plant recently completed a $7.2 million project to upgrade the “blowers,” as seen behind Bill Schott, supervisor of the plant. The energy-guzzling blowers are used to pump air to an aerating tank where bacteria-eating bugs need the oxygen to breakdown wastes. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
Bill Schott, supervisor of Laramie’s wastewater treatment plant, watches over one of the sewage tanks behind him. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily)
Millions Needed
Casper’s Megan Lockwood, manager of the Sam Hobbs Wastewater Treatment Plant, told Cowboy State Daily that the city recently spent $3 million to fix a network of pipes and valves needed to maintain the correct concentration of activated sludge in its aeration tank.
The return of activated sludge -- or RAS in sewage treatment-speak -- to the inlet of the aeration tank is an essential feature of the wastewater treatment process.
You’ve got to keep the bugs alive.
“The RAS equipment was built in the mid- to late 1980s, and they just reached the end of their useful life,” Lockwood said. “Our old one was still working but the operating valves were old. We had some leaks and it was time for them to be replaced.”
Casper is bracing for a much larger and costlier project approaching $50 million to upgrade its aging plant, Lockwood said.
Everything relates to keeping the bugs alive, and the new upgrades to aeration basins are part of this effort, she said.
In an aerated basin system, the aerators provide two functions: they transfer air into the basins required by the biological oxidation reactions, and they provide the liquor mixing required for dispersing the oxygen, wastewater and microbes in one big vat.
“I really don’t know when we’ll do this. Money is always an issue,” she said. “That is the nature of the beast.”
The repairs are never ending.
Just this week, Casper’s city council approved payment of $57,200 to repair a critical centrifuge component needed to digest sludge in order to prepare it for composting at the local landfill.
In Torrington, Troxel has his hands full.
He’s in the middle of an $8 million upgrade on the plant’s headworks facility.
A headworks facility removes trash and debris at the beginning of the treatment process. Wastewater then flows through tanks that allows grit, like sand, to settle.
Flushable Wipes
The headworks is where things like egg shells, toys, thick coffee grounds still glued to filters and flushable wipes are strained out. They can clog up the system if they get through.
“You’d be surprised by the trash that is pulled out,” Troxel said.
The wipes pose a big problem, he said.
“The last time we drained our ponds, the contractor pulled off wipes from our aerators. This is a big problem,” Troxel said.
Torrington has an aerated lagoon system for its wastewater treatment plant, consisting of three ponds.
These are older systems used to treat wastes that went out of vogue decades ago. Those communities that can't afford to update their systems replace manifolds in them, and patch them with glue.
Laramie has what one might consider a Cadillac system.
The city dumped its network of lagoons some years ago, and replaced them with a more efficient “mechanical” process to treat wastes. Think ultra-violet lights to kill off bad bacteria in effluent before it goes to the Laramie River.
Aerated lagoons are simple wastewater treatment processes. Lagoons are usually large, relatively shallow ponds with artificial aeration to promote the biological oxidation of wastewaters.
“Our pond system is 45 years old,” Troxel said.
Bill Schott, supervisor over Laramie’s wastewater treatment facility, is wrapping up a nearly $7.2 million project that he worked on with Rocky Mountain Power to upgrade its blowers – like the ones that Torrington’s Troxel had trouble with.
Laramie expects to cut its power costs on its blowers by a third, he said.
“We budgeted for it,” Schott told Cowboy State Daily of the blower replacements.
“Our old blowers were 30 years old,” Schott said. “The pipes that they blew air through had holes, and were rusted through.”
Peers point to Laramie as a shining example of how to treat wastes.
“We are trying to prepare for current requirements, and for future growth in the city and from [the University of Wyoming’s] dormitories,” Schott said.
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
