Assembly Select Committee on Biotechnology and Medical Technology

Go ahead and call this Assembly, Select Committee on Biotechnology and Medical Technology to order. We do have other Members that will be joining us, I think in the next 15 minutes or so.

I know one has just arrived, but I want to thank you and welcome you to this informational hearing which is titled Biotechnology Industry's Role in Wastewater Treatment. And here we're here at Bakar Labs on the UC Berkeley campus.

Now we know that California is home to a number of biotechnology companies, educational institutions and research and development, which is why the Select Committee is established over this year's session is to be able to engage many of the companies and academic institutions and other organizations that are trying to be able to be at the forefront of a lot of this innovation, both for the cures and the technological advances that they afford, but also to make sure that these good jobs and the future pipeline that we have here remains in California.

Some of these organizations, you know, do provide a lot of groundbreaking technology and we know that they impact in a variety of ways an individual's health and well being.

And I mentioned this earlier to one of our, one of our, one of our guests here in the audience that, you know, we often think, and this Committee has often explored the way that biotechnology and medical technology interfaces with the health industry, whether that's through basic research or looking for specific health outcomes.

But there is so much more that biotechnology research has been able to afford in other areas of study in other parts of our lives. And as we all know here in California, water is a very precious resource. We know it is very difficult to create new water, although it is doable, but incredibly cost prohibitive.

But we can work on cleaning up contaminated water for reuse. And one of those ways is to make sure that wastewater contaminant cleanup, which is not always easy and definitely not cheap for our local governments, that we're finding new solutions to be able to reuse what we already have.

So today we're going to hear about a number of innovations and emerging technologies and where those intersect with the role of the biotechnology industry.

We are going to have two panels this afternoon and our first panel will really set the table on, on a lot of issues for local agencies in which the way they have to deal with treating wastewater, including a lot of the soaring costs that local governments are grappling with and trying to meet a lot of regulatory standards and some of the costs that they have to bear.

Our second panel will discuss some of the research on various wastewater contaminant issues and their impact to help address these issues. And we know what will be presented here today. It's not any silver bullet to being able to solve some of the wastewater cleanup issues for our state because it's complicated.

But who knows, maybe some of the emerging technologies that we're going to hear about today will play a role 51020 years down the road or we'll be able to spawn even more future innovations.

We're grateful for our host here today and I wanted to welcome from Bakar Labs, Jeremy Alberta, who's the COO and who will provide some of his opening and welcoming remarks.

Great. Thank you so much Senator Ward, and welcome some of the Member Pepin. We're so delighted to have you here today. So again, my name is Jeremy Alberga. I'm the Chief Operating Officer of Baker Labs.

And I'd love to tell you where you're sitting and what's happening in this building because it's pretty extraordinary and it's a great example of California's extraordinary economy. This is the Pacific, the former Pacific Film Archive within the Berkeley Art Museum. This used to film.

This used to hold several hundred seats and people used to come here for to see films. The building has now been relocated to center street in downtown Berkeley. But this is the former Pacific Film Archive. Okay, is that better? Okay, sorry about that. And above my head are 35.

So in Baker Biolabs are 35 biotech, early stage biotech companies trying to work on some of the most cutting edge technologies right now that will hopefully benefit society globally. So this is an incredible example of public private partnerships. The building is run by UC Berkeley.

We have private biotechs from around the world, biotech companies from around the world upstairs. I'm happy to give folks a tour at 4 o' clock when we're finished. We have the generosity of private foundations helping run the building and then we have state resources. So QB3 was started by Governor Gray Davis in the year 2000.

And over the last 25 years, over $150 million worth of funding has gone into QB3 at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz. And the purpose of that funding is really to make sure that great life saving technologies exit the lab towards commercialization that benefits society.

So QB3 in this building right now helps programming and helps entrepreneurship and innovation here at UC Berkeley. The companies that are in this building are not just from UC Berkeley, as I said, they're from around the world. So we are helping to bring needed jobs and life saving technologies to the State of California.

The 50 or so companies that have come through Baker Biolabs in the last four years, since we opened in 2021, have raised over $780 million for the California economy and brought several hundred jobs. So we're really proud of what happens in this building.

Thanks to, of course, to state the munificence of the State of California, and thanks to the Assembly and the Senate for their support on this. And finally, we are expanding, as we like to say around here. We're going from one building to three.

We are going to be opening up an incubator on the UCSF campus in 2028, and we're also going to be opening up a climate tech incubator also on the west side of campus here at UC Berkeley in 2028. So we're very excited about what's happening here and we thank you for your support.

Thank you for being here today. And we look forward to this wonderful confluence, this discussion confluence of health and climate tech. So thank you, thank you.

Thank you again for your hospitality. I'd like to turn this over to the Chair of the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks and Wildlife, my colleague Diane Papan, who is from our San Mateo county, and see if you have any opening remarks.

I do. Thank you so much. Assembly Member Ward. I see your able Chief of Staff directing me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'm delighted to be here today. And those are some very impressive statistics. You got my attention. There is no doubt, as Assembly Member Ward mentioned, I hail from just across the bay.

So of course she who is the closest is the latest. That's kind of how it works. We got a few more that we're waiting on. So anyway, as chair of the Water Committee, I am reminded each day that every drop of water counts, no matter what.

And as part and parcel of the equation, we not only are we focused on the quantity of water, but the quality of water. And that's what kind of brings us here today, because the quantity, excuse me, the quality side is perhaps one that we don't always pay attention to.

And so for me, I feel that the quality challenges are something we've got to focus on, whether it's rural areas that are grappling with contaminants in their groundwater or urban areas that are grappling with nutrient discharges and stormwater pollution at the state level.

We're also asking wastewater facilities to do more like remove contaminants, capture runoff, recycle more water, but without giving them the funding or the flexibility. And we know we're guilty of this. So it's time that we, you know, this is going to be a very large multifaceted problem, but it calls for all tools in the toolbox.

And I hope that today we have an opportunity to really talk about what those might be from my perspective, where I hail from in San Mateo county, before coming to the Legislature, I was the mayor and served on the City Council of my own city.

And wouldn't you know, upon my arrival, it was that we needed to replace our wastewater treatment plant. And it was not an insignificant sum. We are a city of 100,000. We share it with another city of about 25,000. But the, the cost to replace was a $1 billion project.

And it was certainly a lesson how to cobble together money from different sources. We got low interest loans, WIFIA loans from the EPA, we got low interest construction loans from the state, and altogether we saved our ratepayers with all of this very clever financing. $50 million in interest payments.

Well, that's nothing to take to, to not be impressed by, certainly, but it's going to have to happen all up and down the state. We're going to need to modernize, we're going to need to innovate, and we're going to need to adapt. When I first ran for office, my tagline was I was going to make sewer sexy.

I'm here to tell you I have sort of achieved that. But now we're going to make wastewater treatment sexy because that's the next endeavor, the next horizon, if you will.

So we're really seeing new approaches that use biology, and that's sort of where this confluence of brains comes together today, because we really feel like there's an opportunity here. We've seen everything from specialized microbes to advanced treatment systems to make weightless water treatment cleaner and more efficient. And I think it's a really exciting frontier, quite frankly.

There's much innovation as it relates to water quality, and this is the right time to kind of take it on. And, and especially now that we have data centers that are using a lot of water.

I won't talk about how the Governor vetoed my data center and water Bill, but it is something that we'll have to definitely monitor and take a look at. But that's back to the quantity, perhaps not the quality.

But in any event, I'm very excited to be here today so we can talk about affordability and access and the capital needs that are massive to Fund how we treat water and, and how we get perhaps maybe recycled water. I don't know. I'm here to listen and thank you for the opportunity Assemblyman Ward and let's go forward.

Thank you Assemblywoman Papan.

So for our first panel we have unfortunately one of our two panelists on the agenda, had a last minute emergency, will not be able to join us, but that's okay because covering the entire bases to be able to help us understand about the role that local governments play in wastewater treatment challenges is Lorien Fono. Fono Fono.

Lorien Fono, who's the Executive Director with the Bay Area Clean Water Agencies to help give us the overall perspective.

I know you represent some of the five of the largest wastewater treatment agencies in the Bay Area and we're really grateful for your time here today to help set the stage and we look forward to your presentation and any questions.

Thanks for the introduction. Lorien Fono, Executive Director of the Bay Area Clean Water Agency is also BACWA. So we are as you mentioned, we're a JPA.

We're made up of the five largest wastewater agencies, but our Members are all of the wastewater treatment plants in the Bay Area, including the ones in Assemblymember Pappins district, as well as many of those collection systems.

And I'm used to speaking for the Bay Area clean water community, but I am going to attempt here to serve in the role of speaking to statewide issues, although it sounds as if I don't actually have much to tell.

Assemblymember Pappin, you seem to be very widely aware of wastewater issues, but I'm definitely here to make wastewater sexy. That is a great goal. So I was asked to provide the 30,000 foot view of wastewater treatment and wastewater needs. So wastewater treatment plants are really at the heart of our communities.

You might have thought it was a different body part, but I'm going to tell you why. It's in fact the heart.

The benefits that we get from wastewater treatment plants in terms of a circular economy include recycled water, which was alluded to in the introduction, but also environmental enhancement by discharging to areas like the Lower South Bay here in fact, which sustains a brackish March habitat which would not be possible without treated wastewater being discharged into the area.

Wastewater treatment plants are also useful for carbon sequestration as well as generating renewable energy from sources that are not for fossil fuels. So this is the biosolids air climate energy nutrient nexus or bacon. So that's we're going to roll out that branding here.

So this is the bacon diagram here where you see how starting at the potw, which stands for Publicly Owned Treatment Works, which is Jargon. So wastewater Treatment plant. We treat the wastewater that comes to us to produce recycled water or clean water for environmental enhance.

But we also have solids that come to us, and that has always been the case. So the solids are generally treated in a digester where they become biosolids and then the gas that is generated from those biosolids.

Methane is a biofuel that can be used for transportation fuels or pipeline injection or many wastewater treatment plants actually have generators on site where they can generate electricity which can offset their own power use.

In fact, in this facility, we are in the service area of East Bay Municipal Utilities District, who has been a pioneer in solids handling and generates their electricity on site. So if you send what I'm going to euphemistically call carbon into the toilet here, that carbon will be used for energy generation.

The solids that can't turn into methane are then trucked away. Historically, we've set those solids to landfills. They were treated as a waste product. But state legislation has restricted the amount of biosolids that can be taken to landfills because they're an organic, relatively clean, organic product.

So those biosolids are land applied where they help to restore soil health and also sequester carbon. Those farms generate food products or silage for animal use. We send those to restaurants in our homes. Again, that carbon goes back to the sewers. A lot of wastewater treatment plants actually have excess digester capacity.

So the state is interested in sending excess food waste to wastewater treatment plants now, where we can generate more renewable energy and also prevent that food waste from going to landfills where it would generate methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas.

So that is my story about how wastewater treatment plants aren't just for managing wastewater, but also for managing carbon and producing clean energy. Can I go to the next slide, please? So this is my second and final slide. So I was asked, what are our top challenges? So our engineering challenges.

Our treatment facilities were mostly built in the 1970s with grants that came from the Clean Water Act adoption. So that means they are getting on 50 years or older, they're reaching the end of their serviceable lives and need to be replaced. Nutrient reduction. So the Clean Water Act does not require wastewater treatment plants to remove nutrients.

Here in California, there have been historic nutrient issues inland, but in the Bay Area, where we discharged to the San Francisco Bay, historically it's been very turbid. So you haven't had a lot of algal growth. Turbid means that the light doesn't penetrate. And algae are plants, they need light to grow. If You've been following the news.

You know that in August 2022, there was a major harmful algal bloom that was unprecedented in our region. We're required now to reduce nutrients by 40%, and that's got an $11 billion price tag that doesn't include debt service. And so without assistance, those rates are going to be.

Those costs are going to be passed along to our ratepayers in the Southern California, where they largely discharge to the ocean. They've actually gone further than us in the Bay Area so far in reducing nitrogen and recycling water to divert nitrogen.

But some science is showing that the Southern California bite may be more sensitive than previously thought due to ocean acidification and hypoxia. And it's possible that those facilities are also going to be required to reduce more nitrogen in the Future. And so $11 billion sounds like a lot of money.

It's going to be more like 40 for the Southern California agencies if that comes to pass. We talked about biosolids management and the transition from landfilling to land application and the increased costs that come with increased treatment as well as energy management.

We are a great resource for producing renewable energy, but these expanded plants with these new requirements are also going to consume more energy. And then we need to make sure that we have a reliable source of clean energy for that. So that's what's going on within the fence line of the treatment plant.

What's coming from outside, of course, is climate change, which I'm allowed to talk to state legislators. We've been changing our language when talking to the feds. But ultimately our facilities are built near the shoreline where they're going to be on the front line of sea level rise.

And so being able to adapt to that is a top priority. Evolving regulations.

So as our scientific understanding of environmental impacts improves and as climate change causes areas that were not sensitive in the past to be more sensitive to wastewater discharges, we are continually responding to tightening environmental regulations that cause a lot of uncertainty in wastewater treatment plant upgrading.

And then, of course, affordability, which is really important for both our partners in the Legislature, local governments, wastewater treatment plants. One of the major issues, of course, that we deal with is Prop 218.

Here in the Bay Area, we have many, many households for whom spending another $20 a month on wastewater rates isn't going to make a dentist. And then there are many households for whom that is going to be the difference between buying groceries or medicine and paying their wastewater rates.

And wastewater agencies, because of 218, don't have the flexibility to Institute a rated or a progressive rate structure that takes income into account. So this is something we're all going to have to grapple with as we spend the funds needed to improve our facilities. And then finally pollutant source control.

So these are toxic contaminants that come into our facilities. This is, I'm really setting the stage for discussion about PFAS or forever chemicals here. So wastewater treatment plants are designed to take care of three Ps, which are pee, poop and paper or toilet paper.

Everything else that comes to our facilities is something that we might be able to handle, but is not really the core mission of wastewater treatment plants. And so where possible, we'd like to implement source control by either reducing the use of this contaminant in our communities or doing pretreatment where it's possible for industrial facilities.

So where PFAS is concerned, and I wanted to call this out specifically because it's in the news and it's on the regulatory horizon. Pfas, we've done studies about where it's coming from, coming to our wastewater treatment plants. And the answer is largely it's coming from the households in our service area.

In California, we don't have PFAS manufacturing, but some of our agencies, in a special study that we ran with the San Francisco Estuary Institute, they went upstream, they popped manholes in residential service areas and they measured the PFAS there.

And the levels that we're seeing in these residential sewer sheds are very similar to what we're seeing in wastewater treatment plants. It means that folks are buying products that contain pfas. They're being exposed to them and they're using them.

They're going into their bodies and they're being flushed down the drain, either through their bodies or through products that they're using, like personal care products. Wastewater treatment plants have been very active with your staffs to advocate for legislative fixes for source control.

But ultimately that is the most important way that we can help protect our communities from PFAS rather than treatment at the treatment plants.

However, that doesn't mean that PFAS treatment isn't a really important thing area of research in terms of being able to address contaminated areas with legacy pollution, as well as working with industries that might provide some very high concentration point sources. We'd like to have tools for those industries to clean up PFAS before it's discharged to our facilities.

So if your staffs would be interested in hearing more about some of these wastewater issues, The California Association of Sanitation Agencies as well as BACWA and the other regional associations, are going to be hosting a webinar later this year on the sort of bacon life cycle.

And so we would be happy to reach out to let you know when that's scheduled and send invites to yourselves and your staffs. So I am happy to either take questions or scoot over so that panel two can commence.

Well, thank you Ms. Fono. I really appreciate this overview. I want to welcome Assemblywoman Macedo from the Central Valley, Assemblymember Dr. Corey Jackson from Inland Empire as well for being able to make this hearing. And while they, I think, start to kind of process some of the overview points, I'll just kick it off with one question.

How do you see I know that you represent the Bay Area facilities, the five counties here, but you're knowledgeable to a degree as well about sort of statewide. Where do you see distinctions, I guess between Northern California, Southern California challenges?

For example, in Southern California we have a huge interest, I'm very San Diego centric myself, in the recycled water or trying to be able to purify for potable use. I'm guessing that's not as immediate of a challenge here in Northern California communities.

But where do you see that distinction in sort of your engineering challenges and what the goals are? And then also on the energy front, how much has that been focused for an opportunity for revenue generation?

Okay, so let's start with the difference between Northern California and Southern California. And we're a nine county border Bay Area, so we like to believe that we have reliable sources of imported water that come in from the Sierras.

And that has been true so far and there are definitely folks who think it will be true for all of eternity into the future. I'm not one of those people and there are many utilities who also don't agree with that.

So Southern California because of water scarcity is way, way ahead of Northern California in terms of recycled water. Most of our recycled water projects have been low hanging fruit like going out to golf courses and parks for Title 22 recycled water.

Our North Bay dischargers also have a dry season discharge prohibition, which means that they can't discharge unless there's enough dilution for their effluent in the summertime. So we have a lot of recycled water up north like Napa and Sonoma Counties. Those are really small agencies though compared to say the SFPUCs and EB muds and so on.

Down here we have some nascent potable projects that are getting started. One is between San Mateo and Silicon Valley and SFPUC.

So the idea is going to be to treat water generated by San Mateo and Silicon Valley Clean Water, which is in Redwood City, and then that recycled water is going to be taken to SFPUC's Crystal Springs Reservoir. So that's going to be a leader in our region in terms of potable recycled water.

And Valley Water, which is formerly known as Santa Clara Valley Water District, is working with the City of San Jose on a similar potable project at the Southern Silicon Valley Advanced Water Purification Center. But even after all this happens, it's still going to be a small fraction of what already is taking place in Southern California.

Did that answer the first part of your question? It did, thank you. Okay. And then the second part of the question was what is the potential for energy generation and the revenue that comes with it?

Yeah, I saw that sort of on the schematic. The flowchart is over here. But are you seeing, seeing that as more of an emphasis or an interest by agencies to try to figure out revenue opportunities?

So that is definitely the case. This isn't something that agencies can do at a loss because another thing that Prop 218 says that you can't charge agency or you can't charge your customers for any activities that are outside of your core mission. And I'm paraphrasing that.

So we wouldn't be able to take food waste and have it come at a cost to our rate payers because that's not what a wastewater treatment plant is for. So there's a couple of different revenue opportunities. One is the tipping fees that come from taking on that food waste.

And the other, of course, is the energy generation that comes from it. So this is sort of one of those really complicated balancing acts that agencies are doing. And we're actually in an interesting time right now because food waste acceptance and energy generation is regulated by Cal Recycle and by CARB and by your local air district.

And so they, like all of us, want to minimize the generation of toxic air contaminants, especially in the area of wastewater treatment plants that are built in often historically disadvantaged areas. So that really puts a cap on what can be generated at a wastewater treatment plant.

So the other options besides generation there is pipeline injection, which requires cleaning the biogas to a certain extent as well as using it as transportation fuel. But as you know, there's regulation for advanced clean, advanced clean fleet rule, which up until now has been, has excluded the use of biofuels for transportation infrastructure. That seems to be changing.

And this is, this is a topic that Casa has been leading on. But ultimately, if we are going to be taking excess food waste, we need some something to do with both the carbon that we receive and the energy that's generated.

So enhanced collaboration between the different regulatory agencies and a statewide vision on carbon and energy management is really needed to help us make these decisions with confidence that the infrastructure we built is going to be actually useful.

Great, thank you. I want to turn that over to any of my colleagues that may have any other further questions. Dr. Jackson.

Thank you very much. When I look at your the engineering challenges, number one is aging infrastructure. Whenever I see that, I see nothing but dollar signs that never end.

There's dollar signs on all four of us and they never end. Yeah.

What is your. I mean, I mean obviously it's getting a whole lot more expensive to deliver services to customers and still try to ensure there's not too much cost pressures on the customer.

What are you seeing as the available resources that will help to address a lot of the aging infrastructure that I'm sure has been put on hold for a lot of time to try to until other resources come up. How are you dealing with that?

Do you have access to climate bond resources or is that not available to you?

So the main tools are rate increases in our customers and our Members. Bacwa's Members at least I'm not sure about the rest of the state are looking at double digit rate increases every year for the foreseeable future. Not all of them, but many of them.

There's the state revolving Fund which provides low interest loans and WIFIA at the federal level which everybody is very nervous about right now. And then if all else fails, there's the bond market as well. And so agencies are trying to balance what is available to them to minimize the increases on their customers rates.

So in terms of climate bond funding, some of that is going to the state revolving Fund with the idea that when you offer low interest loans, as as Assemblymember Papin alluded to earlier, that lower loan repayment is actually basically equivalent to a grant because over time if you're paying less interest, that benefits the community financially.

But yes, these are very difficult times. And when we look back at how our treatment plants were built with Clean Water Act Federal Grants, we don't see anything like like that right now. So folks are used to having excellent wastewater service provided at very low cost because it was front loaded before many of them were born.

And that's not the era that we live in anymore.

And what time, at what point do you have to pull the trigger of making decisions to make sure that you're able to continue to provide that service at a high level.

Well, that, that varies by agency. But as I mentioned, I think before you came in here in the Bay Area, we've got a 10 year clock to upgrade every single treatment plant for nutrient reduction. And so we're trying to balance that with other necessary upgrades to keep plants running.

And of course, as I feel like I've heard this analogy a lot, it's like trying to repair a plane. While whether you're doing an upgrade to address aging infrastructure or for nutrient reduction, you don't get to stop treating wastewater while you're doing it.

If you could do that, if we just didn't treat wastewater for a few years, it would be a lot easier. But obviously we have a mission to protect public health in the environment.

And so it's like one of those slide puzzles, if you recall when you were little that were just the little plastic ones where you have to move one piece out of the way to get another one in. It's very complicated and as you say, very expensive.

I was never able to solve those for some reason. You know, this is.

The kids who did probably went into engineering.

I'm not that smart. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Ms. Papan.

Thank you.

So I just have a quick question. What are your thoughts on smaller treatment plants, but more in more abundance if you will?

Because you know, in my area, you probably know there's that one treatment plant that's very small, that takes wastewater, treats it to non potable and then waters the golf course, you know where I'm talking about on Sandhill and the golf course, put in the money for it.

So you got some private funding for this small wastewater treatment plant. They're getting what they need to treat from another community and it really works. Now, topography speaking, it's uphill, so that helps quite a bit too. But anyway, what are your thoughts?

Because when we talk about money and we talk about this great need, and none of these projects are cheap by any means, but they are a public health necessity, no question about it. What are your thoughts on these sort of smaller ones but in more abundance?

That really is a case by case, on a case by case basis. As you say, they're uphill. So a lot of treatment plants, they look at doing that sort of Title 22, recycled water and a lot of the customers are way uphill.

So it doesn't really pencil out to treat the wastewater down at the central facility near the bay. And then Pump the water back up several miles, a thousand feet up into the air. It does come with some technical challenges like those facilities are still producing biosolids and they don't really have a way to deal with that.

So oftentimes they'll just send them back down to the sewer and you need a bit of water to flush that out. So there's engineering challenges to overcome. But again, if you have a golf course or a big customer that is far away from the central wastewater treatment plant, those can be really great solutions.

Ms. Macedo.

Hi. Thank you so much for being here today. I come from the top ag district and so actually prior to being elected, I dealt with wastewater and wastewater management for dairy farms.

And one thing that I'm seeing is there's this sustainability component that dairy farms particularly continue to implement, the digesters or this vermitriculation screens, things like that, to handle their waste. But I kind of am seeing these agencies kind of move the goalpost of what it means for them to manage their waste.

So what are you seeing as far as collaboration goes with the ag industry? Because right now it seems like waste management is what is preventing any type of growth or expansion for the dairy industry. But also it seems like the changing regulations is preventing investment in some of these sustainability waste management, I guess, adventures.

So I'm really not familiar with the agricultural industry and waste management practices. For us, finding partners for land application of biosolids can be a big challenge. I don't know if you've heard of California Forever. Yeah, obviously you've heard of California Forever.

In the Bay Area, we historically have done a lot of land application in Solano County and most of that land was bought up by this group wanting to implement their new city. And so that's gone now. And so we, we need to find other alternatives. And that's sort of this ongoing issue.

But I'm not really sure what the dairy management and wastewater management commonalities are.

Is there any collaboration with Ag currently. That you're familiar with? Land application is the main way that we collaborate with Ag for non food grade land or are you for growing silAge? Okay, okay, thank you, thank you.

And again, I think it speaks to how, you know, different degrees of impact for different parts of our state. But you know, all these are critical to our home communities. I want to thank you for this overview presentation.

And so for our next panel, I'll invite our three panelists up here as well, maybe join you at the presentation.

Table gets into this heart of a lot of emerging and newer technologies that the biotechnology sector writ large is able to afford when it comes to the challenges of wastewater management, but possibly also the opportunities that many of these innovations are able to be able to provide.

So I'd like to welcome Dr. Romy Chakraborty, who is the senior scientist and Department head with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Dr. Yeggie Dearborn, who is the CEO of CEL Analytical, and Dr. Chungheon Shin, the Research Director with the Kodia Resources Recovery center at Stanford University.

I also wanted to acknowledge, I know on our agenda we had Dr. Jeremy Feaster, who's with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Unfortunately, he's not able to present today because of another challenge. With the ongoing Federal Government shutdown, he's unable to be with us. But we are grateful that the three of you are.

We're looking forward to your presentations. We can begin with you, Dr. Chakraborty, and look forward to your presentations and any questions.

Thank you. Very grateful for the invitation to be here and before I start to tell you about my perspectives as a scientist, just want to acknowledge the great education that the state has given me and my family. Mine from Berkeley, my husband from San Diego, and my little daughter, now a freshman at UCLA.

So most of what I know is a result of what I learned in these fantastic universities. Right now I am a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and what I do is microbiology.

I'm an environmental microbiologist and I'm motivated by finding the fundamental knowledge about microbes that live in different niches of our environment from soil, water, sediment, aquifer, et cetera. They are very powerful engines and can catalyze many, many, many different metabolisms that are honestly quite mind boggling.

And my research is geared toward learning more and more about these microbes so that we can harness their power and bring it towards translational solutions for the environment, energy and environment. So I did want to share two highlights of how you could think of possibly using microbes and microbial communities towards solving environmental problems.

The first I have is pfas which has been introduced earlier in panel one. I don't need to belabor on why PFAS is a problem and how widespread that problem problem is.

But I do want to talk about the current solutions that are being used to treat PFAs from different point sources of contamination, include chemical treatments, physical treatments, use a lot of high pressure and high temperature to try and break down these chemical compounds, but in the process that generate a lot of toxic byproducts, etc.

And unlucky for us, natural breakdown of PFAS is actually very slow in the environment. Some other toxins and contaminants can auto breakdown, not pfas.

So my research is motivated by the fact that if you could combine some of these harsher chemical treatment based breakdown systems along with microbial degradation, that offers a a much more feasible, sustainable and much more cost effective measure.

However, there are challenges in that if you're trying to use a single magic bullet, a single microbe to do so. PFAS is relatively a new contaminant in the environment. And although microbes can evolve very fast to break down what they see around them, this hasn't happened so much for so microbes are still getting used to.

Unfortunately seeing these nasty chemicals around and to break down these chemical bonds in some of the structures that I show in this figure is incredibly hard. The carbon fluoride bonds in these molecules makes it particularly difficult for microbes to break down using their enzymes and other systems.

However, you can unleash the power of microbial communities rather than depending on a single microbe. And these communities that I work with come from the natural environment. So these are not genetically modified, these are not gene engineered. They come from soil, they come from water.

We just do experiments with them in the lab to try and tease about what individual microbes are doing, try to pair them up with their right partner who can help them in that particular process. And in the end we get a much higher efficiency of the particular contaminant degradation that we are looking at.

So in short, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So what a single microbe cannot do, often microbial communities can do that. And this is what is at the heart of a project that I'm currently working on at Berkeley Lab.

Using machine learning algorithms and machine learning tools to put together this very potent microbial community from single Members.

So we're doing a lot of data analysis on on what actually already exists in literature and then trying to identify specific traits or characters that you would in specific microbes and using some machine learning tools to then assemble this microbial community.

The other short example I would like to give is we have done something similar in the realm of protection produced water in the past. So a project that we worked on a few years ago at Berkeley Lab was to try and identify if microbes could be utilized to clean up certain chemicals in produce water.

Now the figure up here on my slide on the top will tell you that for hydraulic fracking and other processes, what goes in into those reservoirs is usually water along with a Few different chemicals. But what comes out is a whole soup of nasty chemicals from heavy metals, hydrocarbons, low acidic ph biocides and others. It's a mess.

And for hydraulic fracking, to extract about one barrel of oil, you need to put in 15 barrels of water. You get about 15 barrels of wastewater. So it's not really that efficient.

So our hypothesis was that using microbes, it is possible to treat some of the wastewater so that you can release and remove the carbon load, the nitrogen load, so that chemical based processes such as filtration or adsorption or osmotic separation can work much better.

So microbes would work upstream of where the chemical technologies would take over and make it easier for those chemical technologies to proceed.

So as a proof of concept, we did this work in huge tanks where we put in the wastewater as it came in a collaboration with the Colorado School of Mines, pumped in a robust group of microbial source, and then over a period of time, what we observed was that the carbon load was indeed decreasing.

The microbes were doing most of the work, removing the organics, removing much of the dissolved solids. And then from this experiment, we were able to extract and recover the chemical key microbial players who are working in tandem. And then putting those microbes together, we had a more efficient system at the end.

I would like to end here with talking about the water efforts. At Lawrence Berkeley Lab, we have the national alliance of Water Institute. It's funded at the level of probably 110120 over five years.

And what it addresses at different aspects of water research, from looking at better membranes for chemical treatments to better desalination, to better cleanup of industrial water, et cetera. If you're interested, please do take a look at their website. I think I would like to end here. Thank you.

Okay, thank you next Dr. Dearborn, for your presentation.

Well, thank you for inviting me here. And I'm really sorry I lost my voice last night, but I'm going to do as best as I can.

Last week, my sympathies.

Thank you. So I own and operate Cel Analytical Laboratory which is an ELAB certified environmental statistics laboratory accredited laboratory in California. And I have an EPA certification for certain analysis in the laboratory. My lab was established in 2005 as a woman owned business. We're located in south of San Francisco, I mean south of Market in San Francisco.

We are California ELAB certified. I have clients that range from state, federal, municipal contractors and homeowners. And I was, my laboratory was one of the five national lab awarded by US EPA to validate molecular techniques for drinking water as water quality indicators.

And then in 2019, right before Covid hit, I became a lead laboratory with Water Research Foundation and California State Water Board for direct potable reuse. And this project was primarily for us to validate methods for detecting, yeah, for detecting viruses, enteric viruses in water.

And then we also stumbled upon SARS, Cov2 in wastewater which was the causative agents of Covid The reason this was important was as a lab I get calls from clients. How do I know how much water I need to test and I need to provide.

And nobody had done the study before to figure out how much waste water, raw wastewater has pathogens in it. So if you don't have a number to start with, you don't know how much your treatment is removing step by step.

And so California water reuse in California under Title 22 Code of Federal regulation initially was based on doing the pathogenic microorganism control by doing indirect potable reuse. So indirect potable reuse has been going on in California for a while and water has been cleaned up and entered into the groundwater recharge.

And there are a number of facilities like Orange County, Monterey one that they are actively doing this type of indirect potable reuse.

So under indirect potable reuse you had steel to show you want 12 log reduction, which is a lot of reduction in viruses like enteric viruses, 10 log reduction in protozoas like Cryptosporidium and Giardia and have a 121010 log reduction value for indirect potable reuse.

Then come in 2021, California developed a new DPR regulations which went into effect in 2024. And that became a more stringent regulation to achieve a 20 log reduction for viruses, 15 log reduction for protozoa and 14 log reduction for giardia which is another protozozoa.

So what we did was we worked with State of California funding from State of California and Water Research foundation in a multi laboratory study, developed methodology that already existed, modified it a little bit by Growing cells in culture for detection of enteric viruses by detection of adenoviruses. And also using beta coronavirus when we were looking at sars.

And then we also, on an ongoing basis for the whole State of California, test enteric viruses in biosolids, which are class A biosolids, if they want to have land application for places where you cannot have any pathogens in the biosolid. The other biotechnology that we do a lot is immunofluorescent microscopy and for detection of protozoa.

So we do use a lot of biotechnology techniques in detecting microorganisms differently in water. This is for protozoa.

We have technology that allows us, and it's being developed more and more, that allows us to detect these organisms that are native and the ones we add to the water so that we can see how well we can detect the native versus what is added. Are we able to recover things the way they should be recovered?

And as the other technology that we use very frequently is quantitative PCR or reverse transcriptase pcr. And right now we have an advent of digital PCR for detection of microorganisms.

I mean, detection of all organisms, viruses in particular norovirus, which is very interesting for wastewater because it's the only virus that currently is not able to grow in culture and has a very bad impact and it has a very bad public health impact.

So norovirus, because it's in such a low number, you can detect it at the molecular level with very, very low quantities. We also do a lot of source tracking for bacteria and viruses in the environment.

And a lot of these help our client, which are utilities, to understand what is how much they need water to do this kind of testing. For example, I wanted to give you. Well, before I do this, I want to show you this. This is on the right is what the raw wastewater look like.

And then on the right in the laboratory, this is what I get as a secondary wastewater. So on the right, on my right, I need only 1 liter of raw wastewater to do all the testing I need to do. But then they want to send me another one liter for the disinfected wastewater, and that's not enough.

So we've done work and studies to show that in order to do log reduction, if I need 1 liter of this water, I will need probably 300 liter of this water or 1200 liter of this water if I want to detect one pathogen in water. So having that information passed along has been challenging to utilities.

But we are sending them filtration systems that they can Filter on site. We are teaching people how to do this type of filtration. So all they have to do filter the water, send it back to us, and then we elute the virus from the filters and we can analyze it in the laboratory.

So there are ways to do this. And we are looking at different filters. That makes it easier for the facility to filter, make their life easier so that they can. Because that's a lot of water we need in order to detect one pathogen in treated water. Now, clients that I currently have are Monterey One.

I do a lot of monitoring for them. Santa Clara Valley Bottling project. They do test for their. They do have bottled water, recycled bottled water, which is great. And we do testing for them for detection of viruses. South of Orange in Molten Niguel, we do look at the log reductions in their secondary tertiary drink water WasTewater.

I have Utah, south of Jordan is doing a very interesting membrane bioreactor DPR validation. They are in their year two, actively testing on a monthly basis. Aurora, Colorado is doing the same. And I get engineering companies that they like to validate membrane bioreactors to make sure that they actually remove wastewater really well, pathogens from wastewater really well.

And for most of the California, we do protozoa crypto and giardo analysis for them. And I like to leave with you with that. And my goal is to get the quality of water. So the quality is very important.

And having the right amount of water tested will give us the opportunity to say for sure, without any doubt, the water that is going to a reservoir or is going indirectly in the groundwater for recharge does not have the pathogen in it. So that's. It's still in development.

But we are also working with some of the engineers to get funding for better ways of testing filters for helping utilities to come up with ways to collect these water in filters that are like dialysis filters actually, and they concentrate.

There are ultra filters that concentrate the water and then like you could use them really effectively, not just for viruses, for anything that you want to get out of water. You can get all the microbes out of the water from using those filters. So I leave you to it. If you have questions.

Thank you, Dr. Dearborn. We will circle back with you. Our last panelist for this panel is Dr. Shin from Stanford University. Again, we welcome you as well and look forward to your presentation.

Thank you. Can I have my slide? So while waiting for my slide I can start my presentation. So good afternoon, Chair Ward and Assembly Members and Members of the Committee, thanks so much for your generous invitation and My name is Chungheon Shin. I am the Research Director at Code Eagle Resource Recovery center at Stanford.

So today my presentation is titled to be Turning Domestic Wastewater into Clean Water and Energy through Advanced Biotechnology. So I want to open my presentation with how the Clean Water act shaped today's treatment systems. So the Clean Water Act of 1972 has been so successful in protecting human health and also ecosystems.

Maybe I need to use another mic. So yeah, it has been successful in protecting human health on our ecosystems. And it has two major bodies. The first one, we have the support from the Federal Government so that we can establish or construct all the treatment facilities across the state.

And the second body was having the regulatory standards so that we can treat wastewater and discharge them with some clean of water. But when the construction was initiated in 1980s, that time the best available technology for us was the systems that incorporate oxygen using microorganisms or aerobic system. It is because aerobic microbes, they grow so fast.

So it was very easy to implement. And since then we've been using the same oxygen based treatment for past 40 years. It treats wastewater very well. But they have major three drawbacks. The first one is high energy, second is high carbon, and the last one is more waste.

So while the aerobic systems processing the wastewater was we need to provide sufficient oxygen for them so that they can degrade the material within the wastewater. But that requires energy intensive operation because we need to run gigantic blowers to deliver sufficient air or oxygen.

In turn, the aerobic microorganism, they produce carbon dioxide and to send them to the air and also while generating some massive bio waste that goes to landfills. So within this figure we can think about what about microbes that don't need oxygen, such as anaerobic microbes.

So if we have anaerobic microorganisms working within our treatment plant, we have no more energy required for oxygen or aeration. Anaerobic microorganism, in turn, they produce biogas, methane, so we can produce energy from our wastewater. So the anaerobic process also will minimize the solid waste production so we can save the usable landfill more.

But we were not able to have such a great anaerobic process within our mainstream application yet is because there is one big caveat, which is anaerobic microbes grow slowly. So which is making the treatment process longer and less efficient unless we have innovative solutions.

The caveat was a great motivator to my research group, so we can think about how can we make the anaerobic process more efficient. So this question made us to configure a new stage that consists with some two stage reactor. The first chamber is more focusing on making the anaerobic process more time efficient.

And the second chamber is improving water quality even better. So within the first chambers we have bio carriers that is fixing all the essential energy microbes so we can have more microbes working within our process so to make the process much faster and more efficient.

So within the second chambers we have ultra filtration membranes that is producing clean and leisure water while capturing and recycling solid back to our reactor to produce more biogas energy. So we scaled up our idea from lab pilot and demonstration scale for past 15 years.

And this is a picture showing our the most recent demonstration system installed at Silicon Valley Clean Water, a centralized treatment facility in Ledo City. So we've been collaborating the project with SBCW and the project is largely funded by California Energy Commission and California waterboard. And the three demand system is processing 24,000 gallons of wastewater per day.

And the entire process time is only 5 hours which is much Shorter compared to 10 hours required in conventional processes using oxygen. So we will be monitoring and comparing the energy use and the bio waste production rate. So this graph will show the energy balance.

So our conventional aerobic oxygen using systems need to use energy to deliver oxygen for them. But our the advanced anaerobic membrane system also need to use energy to run the pump and membranes. But our anaerobic microbes they produce more energy than needed. So making our treatment process to have net energy positive operation.

So which means from switching our conventional aerobic to advanced anaerobic membrane system we can make the anaerobic treatment plant to be net energy producer from net energy consumer. So we will be also monitoring the bio waste production rate. So this bar graph is showing the bio waste produced from the conventional treatment process.

But our anaerobic process is making only negligible bio waste. So which means we can save reduce more than 90% of bio waste production rate by having our system.

So with this improvement in energy and bio waste sectors, so we can save roughly about 30 to 40% operational expenses for the treatment plant, make them more cost effective, which means we can make the treatment facility more affordable for everyone.

So I want to highlight that this slide really show the most important outcome from the wastewater treatment facilities. Because I will show the water quality.

So this is the water quality being produced from the conventional oxygen using system required after 10 hours of their process time the water is still yellowish and there is a steel particle and this water is from water that we produce within five hours from the anaerobic processes while making more energy than required.

So which means we can make some clean water while recovering energy. So I want to close my presentation by re highlighting that the advanced biotechnology turns wastewater into clean water energy simultaneously. So by having the high quality air water and also the more energy and less operational expenses and we can make them more compact.

So thanks so much for your attention. I hope this can be our near future.

Wow.

Thank you, Dr. Shin. Yeah, very eye opening presentation and good news there. Can I bring samples of that water? Maybe not today, but I do want to kick it off with a couple of questions to Dr. Chakrabati. I'm curious about AI and other technologies that are rapidly coming into every aspect of our lives right now.

And are you seeing or any of your colleagues talking about the use of that to help maybe predict some of the potential new effectiveness of different microbes on new compounds?

I was struck how you're talking about how difficult and energy intensive it is to break down PFAs and, and if there are ways to be able to use kind of predictive technologies to maybe think about new experiments.

Yeah, AI ML can certainly help in developing predictive models of what potentially would work or not work and maybe able to identify. However, all of those need validation in the lab experimentally to then prove or disprove or make it more efficient or not. So it is literally a design build, test cycle. Right.

But certainly AIML is helping in big ways.

Thank you and Dr. Dearborn for clarification for some of the pathological testing that you're working on right now. Are those now officially like standard regulations? I guess that. Okay, everybody is. Everybody is directed to employ regularly or when there is a public health event.

No, this is right now. Utilities that are interested in generating for direct potable reuse. Is that what your question is for.

The battery of pathogens that you test for?

The battery of the pathogens, they are, yes, because they want to know what is in there first. But the ones that are most definitely required by State of California and they would, most utilities would only first comply. What is required to meet the regulation includes enteroviruses, adenoviruses, norovirus, G1, A1B and G2, and Cryptosporidium and giadium.

These seven pathogens are required to meet the log reductions for multiple steps of the process.

Got it. And I noticed on there too that you had SARS cov. I think two SARS cov.

Yeah. And that's when I probably alongside many other Californians, I Think first became enlightened that wastewater monitoring was an opportunity for looking at even the earliest levels of community infection for a given pathogen. And that seemed to come up very quickly as a opportunity for analysis.

Two, yes.

How, as an expert in this field, if you're being asked to partner or look into a new pathogen, how fast can you turn around a new assay?

It's not very. It doesn't take long because when we started this project with Water Research Foundation and State Water Board, we weren't looking for sars. And one day I just bought a kit that was already being out there and I said, what if we just test the wastewater and see if we can detect it?

And it was there. And then once we detected, all we had to do was figure out what type of virus you're dealing with. Because most of the viruses we extract from wastewater are non envelope viruses. SARS end up being an envelope virus, couldn't be purified the same way because that purification would have killed the virus.

So we have to quickly come up with a way to purify the virus different way. And it really didn't take that long. And all of a sudden a whole community of scientists got involved and a lot of people in both here in the US and overseas started using all this technology that just allowed that to happen.

So if, for example, let's say there is an outbreak of polio, or if someone is worried about outbreak of polio, you can detect it in WasTewater. Even though CDC doesn't like labs like us go rogue in detecting polio in wastewater. But if it is needed, it doesn't take that much effort if we can find the molecular.

Because molecular level is the easiest way to first see if it's there or not. Then once you know it's there, you can develop cell culture techniques to show how infective the virus is. But cell culture is very expensive. Takes a long time. Anywhere from 48 days, I mean 14 days to 48 days.

Just like the way virus affects us, it takes 12 days. So in the cells is the same way. Yeah, but molecular techniques right now in wastewater technology, they're trying to include inline streaming of molecular detection, maybe using AI to detect viruses.

And that would be a very awesome technology to have on site instead of sending sample to the laboratories.

Wonderful. Okay, thank you for those clarifications and for Dr. Shin I, again, very inspiring. The prototype that you are working with right now is I saw 24,000 gallons per day for a facility that at least I saw the image up there. If I'm translating, if I'm equating the two correctly.

Feels like it's pretty wild compared to aerobic digestion it is much more both cost effective and also energy effective I guess. And that's a good thing. And it's such a large facility though.

How do we vision or if this is proving to be a way of a future, how do we scale something like that up to not have a facility or a piece of infrastructure that that would meet the community's needs? When I think about what a community actually produces.

So we believe our system can support some more also decentralized application where the community requires some new some small units on site so that we can convert organic wastewater into some energy biogas and then so they can biogas energy can be upgraded and then we can have some pipeline injection to convert them as some energy.

So while also if we have a more during the scale process, if we also confirm that our the process can be more cost effective in larger scale. So we can then we can have some maybe fundraise so they can have some sufficient support so they can implement them in a centralized facility in the future as well.

Got it, got it. But I have some big like six flag style facility rather than decentralizing it might provide some other benefits as well too. Might have some more questions, but I'd love to hear from colleagues if anything came to mind on these three presentations. Ms. Macedo.

Dr. Dearborn, it was so interesting because as soon as you said elap my ears perked up. So I do testing for the agricultural industry, whether it's domestic wells, irrigation wells, manure, wastewater, plant tissue, soil, all of the above. And I work with an ELAB certified lab. So congratulations on that because that's a feat in itself.

One thing I do for the ag industry is I look at trends and wait to see in geographical areas if there's alarming trends. Based on the results I get from my lab.

Is there anything that you have noticed in the past year or so that would be something that we need to really watch as far as your results that you're getting back in your data, something that maybe is different or alarming that on the state side we would need to address more imminently.

My exposure to the agriculture has been through Monterey One Water pretty much. Because Monterey One is doing a beautiful job of taking water wastewater as well as Salinas water river into this system, treating it and then the treated water goes into a pond and that pond water gets sold to agriculture industry. Actually that's my understanding.

And that pond gets tested. We tested every quarter for what could be in the water. We have seen one protozoa that could comes up as a question mark as something that could be a potential is called cyclospora. Cyclospora in water is there and it's not in every water. But we have detected few times.

And that protozoa is something that you want to avoid. And other than that, because I only test for viruses and protozoa that are required by the regulation, unfortunately we don't have the opportunity to test for other organisms. But you have to keep in mind we do test for indicators.

There is so many organisms out there and it's very difficult to keep track of everything. But if you have a indicator for each class of organism, for example, you're aware E. Coli is an indicator for coliform enteric virus is enterovirus is an indicator. Cryptosporidium giardia are indicator.

Once you see a pathogenic indicator in the water, you really should worry about all other protozoa. It's not just one, you should worry about all of them. Once the indicator is there, that means you have other pathogens in the water.

So am I understanding it correctly you kind of have handcuffs on you then of what you can test for, but you have the capacity, kind of endless capacity to test?

Yes, but not the funding though. Nobody has the money for endless testing. So you have to pick and choose your battle. So either you have to do what it's what you could do or you can provide whatever they like. It's just, it's just, it's not cost effective for them.

So if you had, you know, let's just say there's endless amounts of money which Lord knows every Legislator on this panel wishes that was the case for the State of California. What would be a couple of things that you would say specifically we should Fund to imminently investigate or test for.

What would you say would be like your wish list if I was a genie and could grant you three wishes?

I think I already have a wish list. I mean the enteric viruses are bad. We need to make sure public is safe. Like you need to make sure there is enough water tested that we don't have norovirus in water. You don't have RSB in water. You don't have some adenovirus in water.

You want to make sure you don't have those protozoas are bad too. You don't really want to have giardia in water. You don't want to have these things in water.

So I do have my wish list right now I just want to make sure the methodology that is used, the volume of water that everyone tests matches what the expectation is.

I cannot make miracle if someone sends me one liter of water and if I say it's non detect, I won't feel comfortable saying it is non detect because it's just one liter of water. I don't know if that's enough. Not knowing what the technology they use so that they all have to be together.

We need to know how much is initially in the water, how they are treating the water, and then how much treated water is required. When we participated with the US EPA in 2012 to do unregulated contaminant monitoring for these viruses that became mainstream testing.

What happened was US EPA did a lot of study to figure out they needed to collect 12 to 1500 liter of water from reservoir to see whether there is one pathogenic virus present in the water or not. Wow, that's very essential.

So my final question is, I come from a very poor and underserved part of California, which is the Central Valley. Do you feel like all of California is being monitored and tested the way that it should be or are you just seeing this more in your major cities?

No, I work with Tulare in Central Valley and right now I work with an engineering firm that works with Tulare. We do test their, you know, treated water for them, we help them. I think it's true.

We hear there is a lot of work being done in LA, Orange County, San Diego, but there is work also being done in Central Valley and that's exciting because they're also close to me and I like that so.

Well, thank you. That's music to my ears. I appreciate your time. You're welcome.

Just a quick follow up if you need great volumes. Is the potency of what you find in there significant enough to be of concern?

Yes. Okay. It takes one virus to cause infection, but that one virus has to be infective. And the only way you know, it's infective is by doing the cell culture.

So if, if you take the water, you concentrate the water, you apply it to the cell culture and then it become, it affects the cells, causes them to round up, form a cytopathic effect. Then you know, the virus has a capability to infect and it really takes one virus to infect. From public health, from public health perspective.

Dr. Jackson.

Very, very, very interesting projects you all have worked on to try to figure out how to do it more efficiently, how to, to do it more cost effectively as well. As energy effective. Who would you traditionally go to when you say, hey, we would love to scale this, we would love to bring it to market.

Who would you usually approach to be able to do that?

Industry partner.

An industry partner. Someone who already allowed you to test with them and then hopefully they would adopt it and then from there. Okay, who would you usually go to for?

For now we will be collaborating with Silicon Valley Clean Water as the further demonstration project. And so we will be collaborating with bea. The company is the provider or supplier for the membrane other technologies. And also for past until last year we were being supported by the California State government, CEC and also the California Water Board.

And from this year we will be more collaborate with some also Department of Defense for the more federalist project. So yeah, but we will be also seeking for more some support from the state government so that we can have more demonstration for our the California and some of the the municipalities.

Thank you.

You mentioned Dr. Shin, the idea of taking some of what you produce into injecting into a pipeline, is that right for the biogas? Yes, but I think our first witness said that'd be a very expensive Proposition. Did I have you right when you were talking about that?

I commented that the biogas generated at wastewater facilities also often needs to be cleaned up to a point where it might not pencil out. But it's possible that this process produces a cleaner biogas?

Yes, we produce the biogas that has much higher biogas, the methane composition. So we should require less cleaning processes.

So I have a question for you on your diagram here because it's a little confusing to me. You see how you have this arrow, this red arrow and I can't tell.

So that's actually part of animation that I have on slide. So the bar will pop up at the last. So yeah, so that's the printed version.

So I'm sorry about it, but I'm starting with just yellow boxes as energy consuming but having a popping up some the blue box, green box highlighting that we produce more energy and that they go out and just really maintain the blue box there. So that's going to be how much energy we are net producing.

You get the blue and the green as net energy.

No, just the blue box really main there as making the energy part deep rather than energy consumption mean what's the green? That was the total energy we produced. And then since we also need to use energy so that we offset it. But still we have the blue box in a positive value.

So which means we are producing more energy.

Okay, so the blue box is what's to focus on. Yes, thank you. Gotcha. Okay, thank you. I kept looking at it, looking at it, I was like, maybe. I'm not kidding. Okay, thank you.

And I guess I wanted to ask maybe for some closing thoughts from all of our panelists to hearing off what Ms. Macedo was asking.

If, you know, endless money being not nearly in our near term future right now, but good to prioritize as we do have the opportunities to maybe try to sort of trade off in our budget conversations what our priorities should be next year, if there are effective ways of state funding, or importantly, taking a new look at old barriers that you see in a lot of your technological work.

What advice do you have for state lawmakers to be able to focus on next year to help improve the situation for you, to help make many of these advancements faster?

For me, currently I just partnered with an engineering company and applied for funding. Excuse me, funding through Water Research Foundation for the secondary effluent treatment. How do we test the secondary effluent treatment? We've done testing for the primary. We know what the wastewater is. What do we tell people how to test for the secondary?

The biggest issue we had is the funding that is available. It's only around $200,000. And we need to have multiple laboratories participate so that data that is produced in my lab can be made also in another laboratory so that we can say it's not just my laboratory that's producing this. We need to have multiple.

But because these tests are not cheap, we are only limited to do three round of testing for each laboratory to be able to compare if we get this grant. But the problem is we want utilities to participate, we want state to participate. Three sets of sample is not enough, is not a representative.

We need to gather enough data that we can tell everyone and help the State of California develop the rule for secondary for tertiary so that people know what they have to meet in order to meet their log reductions in their treatment system.

So as of now, I wish we would have more participation with utilities as well as state to bring a little bit more funding so that we can do a little bit more of a study on this, just like the way we did with the raw wastewater.

Got it. Thank you. Anything from Dr. Chakraborty.

A lot of good ideas die in research labs because they are not able to scale and translate. And that is really sad. So for us, you know, we are funded by different agencies, federal, etc. To develop those ideas, to prove them in the lab. Then what do you do as a next Step.

So what we really earn for is partnership at a local scale, at the state scale. Industries provide us with a helping hand. And here try out our system with yours to see it's workable. But then how do you take it out there to the community, to the state is a big issue.

Okay, thank you.

I think that was a great comment, Hannah. So it'll be so great if we can have more opportunities. Opportunity means here some having more connections to the potential, the community or the utilities. They want to have some test out some of the advanced, some treatment facilities.

And so it would be great if we can some have some financial support that can support the project more. Thanks so much.

Yeah, thank you. Ms. Fono, any closing thoughts?

Yeah, I mean we have a lot of needs and there's a huge market for innovative technologies to meet these multiple needs.

So where there is the opportunity to implement some a technology that has multiple benefits in terms of reducing the footprint for treatment, increasing the energy generated, reducing nutrients, making water more suitable for recycled water grant program, program to reduce the barrier that when agencies take on the risk of piloting this technology would be really helpful.

And then besides that, I would sort of, I would propose a sort of more procedural priority for the state Legislature, which is, as you heard me talk before, that that wastewater treatment plants do a lot of different things and touch a lot of different environmental media.

Thinking about ways in which the different agencies that regulate all of these different media could better work together to enhance the state's environment and protect public health in a more holistic manner would benefit all of us.

Well summarized. Thank you. Thank you all. I want to thank, we want to thank all of our panelists for being a part of the presentation here today. We do have a on our agenda opportunity for public comment.

I don't know if there's any members of the audience here wishing to give us one or two minutes of your thoughts, but. And behind you, sir, if anybody else would like to join you, you can line up here at the microphone and begin when you're ready.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Good afternoon. My name is Spencer Saks. On behalf of the Council California Association of Sanitation Agencies, I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank the Select Committee and the panelists for providing this presentation today. There are many considerations when it comes to wastewater treatment and emerging technologies.

Lorien with BACWA covered a good amount of those. It's a very delicate balance working on scalability and. And reliability with affordability to our ratepayers. And so finding that balance, I think is a really big element of how we can best, you know, provide these essential services for our ratepayers.

The ecological systems that wastewater treatment plants are, are very complex and very delicate. And so there's a lot of these emerging techs that we would love to continue to work with the academics and, and the stakeholders to see how they would work for each various treatment plan.

They vary based on watersheds, communities, many, many elements that can go all into the biological makeup of those treatment plants. So we look forward to continuing to work with the Legislature, this Committee, and all the stakeholders. So thank you.

Thank you very much. And seeing nobody else approaching the microphone, I want to thank all of our colleagues from the Select Committee for your attendance here today. We really appreciated the insight that we were given. And with that, we are adjourned.