State funding reshapes Savannah-area water market

Savannah has long controlled the area’s water supply, treating massive quantities of drinking water and selling what the city didn’t need to neighbors in Chatham, Effingham and Bryan counties. 

But as development intensifies the area’s thirst, one of the city’s long-time water customers – Effingham County – is poised to become a bigger player in water treatment and delivery. 

The bulk of a $501 million water infrastructure package approved by the state legislature in March is headed to Effingham, which plans a new surface water treatment plant, only the second one in Coastal Georgia. 

History repeats itself 

The push to increase the area’s water supply grew from efforts to satisfy the demands of the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America site. The Bryan County electric vehicle manufacturing complex will need 4 million gallons of water a day when it’s fully up and running. Nearby industrial and residential developments are expected to guzzle another 2.6 million gallons daily. 

An on-site well covers Hyundai’s needs for its construction and launch. Wells in Bulloch County are then expected to provide the water needed for the plant until more surface water is available. Bulloch was chosen because it’s the so-called green zone where additional groundwater use is not limited. The state capped or reduced the total amounts that can be withdrawn from the aquifer in Chatham, Bryan and part of Effingham counties. 

The Bulloch wells were initially planned to provide water to Hyundai for its first 25 years. But Bulloch County residents objected over fears for the continued productivity of their own agricultural wells, and the timeline was shortened to 15 years. 

Hyundai’s thirst and the resulting pivot to surface water repeats a pattern seen with a 1930s era economic development darling – the Union Bag paper plant. The New Jersey-based paper mill came to Savannah in the Great Depression promising to save the city with good jobs. In return it got plentiful water. Not from the river, even though Union Bag  was sited on the Savannah, as its modern day successor International Paper still is. Instead, the pulp and paper giant was given free access to millions of gallons of water a day from the Floridan aquifer. 

But very quickly, local authorities realized the huge withdrawals risked harming the aquifer. They turned to the Savannah River to boost the municipal supply without further straining the aquifer.

“It had to do with the forecasted demand, and actually demand at the time in the early 1940s,” said Savannah’s chief of water resources, Ron Feldner. “Surface water had to be there to supplement the groundwater source and supply because of the industrial demands that were so rapidly increasing.” 

Then, as now, the state government stepped in. In 1945 the General Assembly created the Industrial and Domestic Water Supply Commission to administer the construction of the water filtration plant in what was then Port Wentworth. 

Using water drawn from 10 miles away in the Abercorn Creek in Effingham County, the plant could treat 35 million gallons a day when it opened. The facility gave Savannah greater ability to supply not just its own needs, but also to sell water to smaller municipalities in the three-county area.

“The City of Savannah has been a regional water supplier at least since 1947 when the Industrial & Domestic water plant was constructed by our predecessors, in a very prescient move,” City Manager Jay Melder told Savannah City Council at a workshop in the fall. 

Savannah’s expansion

Upgrades over the years have increased the Industrial & Domestic plant’s capacity to its current flow of 58 million gallons a day, or MGD. But the last major upgrade was in 1995 and the aging facility is strained by increasing demand. 

One day last August, the plant treated 57.5 million gallons.  

“They’re rated for 58; there’s not a whole lot of fluff left in the existing facility,” water infrastructure consultant Jonathan Ladd of Black & Veatch told Savannah City Council in September. “In terms of capacity, additional standby units are needed to allow for more routine maintenance or unexpected corrective repairs.”

Savannah plans to increase the facility’s capacity to 65 MGD as quickly as possibly. The planned upgrades include a new settling basin plus filtration system improvements at the water treatment plant as well as new water storage tanks there. At the water intake on Abercorn Creek, the city plans to install an oxygen injection system to meet state regulatory requirements.

The governor’s mid-year budget authorized $146 million for Savannah’s water issues, enough to cover this initial phase of upgrades, which is expected to be completed over the next two years. 

The city ultimately expects to increase the capacity at its surface water plant to 100 million gallons per day to meet long-term demand.

What Effingham gets (and Bryan) 

Effingham County currently buys 4 million gallons of water a day from Savannah, all of it treated surface water. It also operates two wells that provide about 370,000 gallons a day. Cities and private systems in Effingham serving their customers with groundwater totaling almost 4 million gallons a day.  

The county population more than doubled over the last three decades to an estimated 73,000 last year, and growth continues. Effingham officials expect half of Hyundai’s more than 8,000 employees to reside in the county by 2035.

Plans call for river water to keep Effingham hydrated in years to come.  Effingham is situated on the Savannah River upstream from Chatham. Even in the 1940s when Savannah’s Industrial & Domestic plant was built, the actual water intake was in Effingham County, where it remains. 

Funded by $365 million in loans and grants from the state, Effingham plans a water treatment plant that can process 14 million gallons a day, and could eventually expand to 28 MGD. 

Effingham County Manager Tim Callanan said the idea for the water treatment facility surfaced in January 2024 when the county updated its water and sewer master plan. 

“We didn’t bring it up related to Hyundai, but looking regionally, it’s safer to have two intakes and safer to have one further away from the coast so you don’t have to deal with salt water,” he said. 

Effingham is planning to pull water directly from the Savannah River at Georgia Power’s Plant McIntosh property. That’s about 8 miles inland from Savannah’s intake on Abercorn Creek. In April 2024, the county hired a consultant, GMC, to do a feasibility study.

Feldner, Savannah’s water chief, said the city is all in. 

“We talked with Effingham County relatively early on in 2024 about collaboration and welcomed the partnership that has evolved here,” he said. “At no point did we feel surprised or caught off guard by what their plan was, but instead, it was a conversation that evolved into the partnership as you see it today.” 

Feldner was previously the city manager of Garden City, which buys water from Savannah, so he’s been on the other side of that equation. 

“I can tell you that I know that Effingham County has historically expressed an interest in a surface water plant along the lines of what’s being put forth here, for their own reasons, and then also, I think, for supply redundancy resiliency in the region and Savannah,” Feldner said.

Callanan welcomed the chance to cooperate with what’s been his county’s main water purveyor. 

“We were ecstatic that Savannah really wanted to help us in this and saw the big picture,” Callanan said. “They were on board.”

In a November memo to state water regulators at the Environmental Protection Division, Callanan stressed the benefits of its proposed surface water treatment plant.  He cited “redundancy – we could in case of emergency provide a backup water supply for the City of Savannah and vice versa” as well as the potential to provide water to the western portion of Savannah and to Bulloch County. 

Environmentalists have been calling for better water planning. So Savannah Riverkeeper Tonya Bonitatibus supports the Bryan, Effingham and Savannah collaboration. But, she’s uneasy about how long the good feelings will last. 

“So the fact that the governor has gone in and given this money to three different entities without any significant agreement on the table that says ‘you guys are going to form a regional entity and figure out how to get along’ is, I think, a red flag that we’re continuing the same kind of like just throw money at the problem and hope that It goes away,” she said.

What about the river? 

Local government officials are pleased about their increased access to Savannah River water for drinking water supply. 

But for environmental groups, the news about expanded surface water use is a mixed bag. 

Ogeechee Riverkeeper Damon Mullis advocates for diverting surface water to industry to preserve the more pristine aquifer water for drinking. He sees the plan and its $500 million in state funding as a good start. 

“We are pleased to see that plans to address our region’s future water supply needs are finally starting to materialize,” he said. “This investment has the potential to serve as a foundational step in future regional water planning.”

The move should benefit the aquifer.

“This new supply of water is one piece of the solution that will help to wean industrial water users off the Floridan Aquifer and allow it to begin recovering,’ he said.

It won’t benefit the Savannah River, though. And it’s a waterway that’s already called on to play many roles. 

Along with Savannah’s withdrawals, the river also provides drinking water to more than 60,000 retail customers in South Carolina’s Beaufort and Jasper counties. Its harbor is dredged to allow massive ships to call on the port, and it’s a waste receptacle for industrial pollution.

The 313-mile-long Savannah can handle the additional withdrawals, observers say. The closing of Georgia Power’s coal-fired plants Riverside in 2005 and Kraft in 2015 removed almost 400 million gallons a day of demand on the river. In 2019, Georgia Power closed its coal unit at Plant McIntosh in Effingham, reducing its need to withdraw river water for cooling. All told, the plant closures on the lower Savannah River give suppliers like Savannah, and now Effingham, more wiggle room to request new or expanded water withdrawal permits.

But how much is too much to withdraw? 

“I think that the water is like one more straw in the camel’s back of a really, really overloaded camel, and we just keep playing, and at some point in time, things are going to start breaking, and when they do, I hope we have the right contingency plan,” said Riverkeeper Bonitatibus.

She also points back to the successor to the company that pushed the region to start relying more on surface water, International Paper. Its two facilities in Chatham County last year used more than 20 million gallons a day of water from the aquifer. 

Using aquifer water  – especially the 13.5 MGD available for free from its own well – saves the paper mill money. The company would have to pay to treat river water to a manufacturing standard, even if it had a permit to pull it from the Savannah itself. The way Bonitatibus sees it, that’s doubly unfair to nearby residential users. 

“Why should those industries get access to that water, especially when places like International Paper are the linchpin of the pollution source in the lower river?” she asked.

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