From February 2018 to August 2021 I was Contractor's Executive Director and Project Manager on the 12.7 million euro sewage treatment plant at Zugdidi, in western Georgia. FIDIC Yellow Book, ADB financing, Ludwig Pfeiffer Kassel as lead contractor and EMIT of Italy as technology partner, with United Water Supply Company of Georgia as employer.
The plant treats 11,122 m3 a day for 83,298 population equivalents and covers around 40 percent of its own energy from biogas CHP. While we built it, a second crew was laying the city's entire sewage collection network, every line engineered to converge on our inlet works. The result is a complete urban wastewater system built in parallel rather than in sequence.
The first real test came before a single basin was poured. Initial geotechnical surveys reported a dangerously high water table, which would have driven up concrete volumes and cost significantly. Rather than accept the data, we commissioned a detailed investigation and found clay-sealed water pockets acting as hydraulic caps and giving false pressure readings. Revised borings showed the actual groundwater far lower. That finding cut structural concrete requirements, cost and programme time in one move.
The second test was the pandemic. In March 2020 German equipment shipments stopped for more than four months. I restructured the supply chain through intermediate sourcing, kept a skeleton crew on site, and re-sequenced commissioning so work continued in parallel while critical deliveries were outstanding. There were no workforce redundancies and no schedule slip at handover.
The site ran on six nationalities at once - Serbian leadership, Austrian supervision, a German contractor, an Italian JV partner with a Turkish on-site team, and Georgian crews and subcontractors. That was managed with multilingual procedures, shared visual work plans and weekly alignment meetings, which is unglamorous and completely decisive on a project this long.
The biogas CHP system was new technology for the region with no local reference plant to point at. Anaerobic digestion chambers were brought to operating temperature, first gas was recorded in October 2020, and the CHP units were synchronised with the site grid. Six weeks of optimisation took the plant to 40 percent energy self-sufficiency, a first for Georgian water infrastructure, with surplus heat feeding the office complex.
ADB's acceptance protocol was 37 performance tests covering biological efficiency, energy performance, sludge quality, effluent standards and mechanical reliability. All 37 passed. Three and a half years, zero lost-time incidents, handover in August 2021. Treated effluent leaves into the Chkhoushi, joins the Jumi, then the Enguri, and reaches the Black Sea clean.
STP Zugdidi, Georgia - Project Summary and Related Work
PROJECT SUMMARY