Between January 2017 and February 2018 I was EIA Project Manager on the $9.27 million wastewater treatment plant at Anaklia, on Georgia's Black Sea coast. ENAA contract, financed by ADB Loan 3078-GEO, built by Ludwig Pfeiffer with Protecno of Italy supplying the process technology. I led the electrical, instrumentation and automation delivery from control system and field instrumentation through to commissioning.
Anaklia had the dilemma every fast-growing resort knows. The town was selling Black Sea views while discharging its wastewater into the same sea, and the coastal ecosystem the local economy depends on was directly downstream of the outfall. Effluent quality had no margin for error.
The plant treats 4,253 m3 a day for 25,600 population equivalents. The biological core is extended aeration activated sludge with simultaneous nitrification and denitrification in one basin regime, which holds effluent quality through the seasonal load swings a tourist town produces. Phosphorus is removed chemically, dosed against inline measurement rather than a fixed rate, so the strictest discharge parameters are met without overdosing.
Ahead of the biology sits the stage nobody photographs and everybody depends on. Coarse screening, grit removal and grease separation protect the pumps, the diffusers and the biological process itself from day-one abuse. Skip it and the plant degrades quietly for years.
The sludge line was where the project could most easily have failed on its own terms. Handled badly, sludge simply moves the pollution from the sea to the land. Gravity thickeners and centrifuge dewatering cut the volume by 85 percent, and the stabilised product leaves as safe agricultural fertiliser rather than as landfill. That closed the loop.
My scope covered power distribution, motor control, the full instrumentation package for the biological process, and the control system tying screening, aeration, dosing and the sludge line into one operable plant. Commissioning meant biological start-up and then performance proving - nutrient removal tuned against live inline measurement until the effluent quality demonstrably cleared the discharge standard.
The handover included the part projects often skip. A trained Georgian operating crew took the plant on in February 2018, prepared alongside commissioning rather than briefed at the end. When the lab results came back, the effluent leaving the outfall was cleaner than the sea receiving it. WWTP Anaklia and WTP Mestia were delivered as one package, executed in parallel over the same thirteen months.
WWTP Anaklia, Georgia - Project Summary and Related Work
PROJECT SUMMARY