Analysis of Nutrient Removal Costs in the Chesapeake Bay Program and Implications for the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin

This paper examines construction-level costs in 2006/2007 dollars for fifty wastewater nutrient removal projects constructed or under construction in Virginia and Maryland. The costs analysis reveals what many in the industry have felt in terms of accelerating treatment costs and explores contributing factors. Treatment costs are also parsed using an Improvement Factor concept that tallies the extent of flow expansions and technical modifications being undertaken to allow generalization of cost envelopes for various project types. The generalized costs from the Chesapeake Bay (CB) were applied to goals in the USEPA's recent Science Advisory Board Report on The Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic Zone to frame the potential costs of nutrient removal facing the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin (MARB), which covers 31 states and 41% of the US population.