Veolia Water to Build and Operate the New Marquette-lez-Lille Wastewater Treatment Plant

The Lille metropolitan area has awarded Veolia Water the contract to reconstruct the Marquette-lez-Lille wastewater treatment plant, the biggest such facility in the north of France. The new treatment plant will be built on the site of the previous one, which is now obsolete. Project design and construction has been awarded to a consortium headed by OTV France Nord, a Veolia Water subsidiary, and comprising NORPAC, DEMATHIEU & BARD, AMODIAG, BONNARD & GARDEL, and ALH (Alain Le Houedec, architect).

Work will begin in mid-October and will last a little over four years. It will generate cumulated revenue of 75 million euros for Veolia Water. Operation of the plant will start on January 1, 2011. Veolia Water will be the operator under a contract of almost six years that will generate estimated cumulative revenue of 28 million euros. All the civil engineering structures needed to obtain good ecological status of water, which will be required by 2027, will be in place by February 2013, when the new wastewater treatment will become operational. The new sludge treatment process will follow, by 2015 at the latest.

The new plant will have the capacity to treat wastewater from an equivalent population of 620,000, and will have two separate treatment trains, one for wastewater (2.8 cubic meters per second) and one for stormwater (5.3 cubic meters per second). Proven technical solutions will be used, such as the MULTIFLO® and ACTIFLO® settling processes, and HYBAS™ biological treatment, which combines the best of the two technologies: the activated sludge process and the fixed culture process.

For sludge treatment, the implementation of EXELYS®, a new thermal hydrolysis process from OTV, will reduce the quantity of sludge produced by 20–40% and increase the production of biogas by 15–30% compared to a standard digestion. After being dried and stored, half of the sludge will be used in agriculture and the other half in a cement works.

As the Marquette-lez-Lille plant is in a densely populated urban area, particular care has to be taken in dealing with odours. Veolia Water’s offer includes full control over odour emissions, their treatment and monitoring.