North Las Vegas Wastewater Treatment Plant upgraded with GE’s LEAPmbr technology

GE has announced it provided the city of North Las Vegas, Nevada, with its high-performance LEAPmbr membrane bioreactor technology for an upgrade to the city’s wastewater treatment plant. By using GE’s LEAPmbr system, the city will reduce its energy and maintenance costs including an estimated 29 per cent reduction in membrane scour energy costs. The upgraded water reclamation MBR facility, one of the largest in the United States, treats the municipal wastewater for more than 300,000 of North Las Vegas’ residents and processes up to 25 million gallons of wastewater per day.

With GE’s LEAPmbr and ZeeWeed 500 membranes, the newly upgraded facility can more efficiently treat the city’s wastewater. Historically, the city of North Las Vegas relied on the city of Las Vegas to treat its wastewater, but in 2012, North Las Vegas built its own plant using GE ZeeWeed membranes and MBR technology. The city then upgraded the facility with LEAPmbr technology three years later to provide the same treatment capacity and high-treated water quality while reducing energy and maintenance costs and increasing productivity.

Dave Commons, water reclamation facility administrator for North Las Vegas, said, 'The retrofit will give us a 29 per cent energy reduction on membrane aeration and will save more than $100,000 per year in energy and maintenance costs.'

GE’s LEAPmbr aeration technology provides optimal energy usage by reducing membrane air scour costs along with essentially eliminating cyclic valve maintenance. In addition, the plant’s advanced SCADA system allows the city of North Las Vegas to have minimal staffing at the plant and the wastewater treatment facility can be controlled remotely.

Specifically for the project, GE retrofitted the existing membrane cassettes by supplying LEAPmbr retrofit kits. This allowed the plant to take advantage of the lower air and energy requirements while continuing to get the full life cycle operation out of the originally installed membranes.