Infrastructure Management Outlook on St. Louis Eyeing Selling Water

St. Louis, Missouri is looking to the future and realizing it is well-placed to supply water to other drier states as the demand increases.

If they continue to follow in that vein of thought, well-implemented infrastructure asset management will need to be put in place to ensure that the region can sustain the provision of water for itself and for selling on to those areas which are in the drought, such as most of the Western United States.

As Water Online reports,

“St. Louis water utilities have the capacity to increase the amount of water they treat.

“Average daily demand for water from the St. Louis Water Department and Missouri American Water in St. Louis County is about 300 million gallons. Together, the two water systems have the capacity to produce more than twice that, about 760 million gallons a day,” the report said.

The utilities say they are actively working to improve local infrastructure. For instance, Missouri American Water “set a new record in water main replacement in 2014 — completing approximately 200 projects across St. Louis County,” the company said in a release.”

If managed well, St. Louis may really be onto something worthwhile, both for the state of Missouri and for the dry states they would provide for.

As Inframanage.com has noted before – the discipline of infrastructure management involves looking at long term whole of asset lifecycle expenditure, and also the revenue streams required to provide for that expenditure.

The St Louis water utilities have looked at their future demand and understood that they currently have excess production capacity.  This is good infrastructure management analysis.

Understanding this, they could either over time downsize/mothball treatment capacity to match local demand or look to expand demand to meet capacity.  

St Louis is exploring the second option, which will, in turn, generate additional revenue streams.

Just a few of the infrastructure management risks in this type of approach are:

• St Louis local demand might increase as the economy lifts out of recession and grows (will they retain enough capacity to service the local demand) – this is a risk across the USA – it has been a big recession that has lasted a reasonable length of time.  Growth will come, and analysis needs to determine what that will subsequently mean for water demand

• The Drier States might develop other water sources, or drought conditions lift – the capital expenditure needed by St Louis water authorities to provide pipelines to supply would need to be backed by long-term rock-solid contracts for the supply

• The Drier States might look to implement non-asset demand management solutions, and reduce their overall demand for water

• The Drier States might look at implementing grey-water reuse initiatives, an alternative asset solution, and reduce their overall demand for water

The St. Louis water utilities are to be commended for ‘looking outside the box’ with their infrastructure asset management and trying to develop alternate revenue streams.

It will be interesting to observe how they manage the associated risks, and how these proposals develop over time.

PHOTO CREDIT: Gateway Arch by Stephen M. Scott vi Flickr Creative Commons License.