05 Sep Interview with Cornelio Acosta, Executive Chairman, Belize Water Services (BWS)
Can you give us an overview of BWS in terms of its main operations, its recent milestones and achievements and noteworthy causes?
The history of Belize Water Services (BWS) started in 2001, with the divestment of assets from the Water and Sewerage Authority. Thereafter, we started expanding throughout the country. We also looked at water and sanitation for three of the primary areas in the country of Belize: Belize City, San Pedro and Ambergris Caye, which is the primary tourism destination for Belize. Also, in Belmopan, our capital. Our footprint in sanitation is about 30% of the entire surface area, an area we look at expanding.
Aside from that, we provide water services to all the primary urban and peri-urban areas, those that are immediately outside of the urban cities and towns that we have. The total number of customers is a little over 66,000. Since 2020, we’ve grown that customer base by six percent. We’ve been expanding to other areas within our service areas. Currently, we are servicing about 98% of our entire service area. There are a few gaps which we’ve been addressing; those gaps amount to about 30 million Belize dollars ($14.9 million) to go completely 100% providing water in our service area. The service delivery is twofold in Belize: about 60% comes from Belize Water Services and another component is in charge of the rural areas, the Ministry of Rural Transformation and Labor. We work hand in hand to service the entire country of Belize.
Can you highlight the differing processes across the country for water production, how it is decided what method is best for each locality and the strengths and weaknesses of each area?
BWS provides its water through above-ground services such as rivers. We also do groundwater services. We have wells in different areas of the country. For example, in the North, Corozal and Orange Walk are serviced primarily through ground sources and in the South, which is Placencia, a tourism destination, along with the district of Toledo, are being served through ground sources. In the Cayes, we have four desalination plants: two in San Pedro, the largest of the islands and two in Caye Caulker. We most recently acquired the second one for Caye Caulker at $2 million. That has been commissioned and it is currently working. Historically, these islands faced a shortage of water. In the past three years, we’ve managed to commission a large reverse osmosis (RO) plant in San Pedro and another new RO plant last year in Caye Caulker, essentially increasing our production capacity by 100 percent.
How do you work to increase access to piped water, what expansion projects are you undertaking and what is the demand for water across the country?
Our focus has been primarily on creating redundancies as a result of climate change. In the ground sources, like well sources, production output has been significantly less due to a drop in the water cable. In some areas, we’ve seen increased salinity and we’ve had to close that well and look at new options.
We’ve looked in each of our service areas to ensure that there’s continuity in water and then started looking at further expanding. The last investment we had was $8 million in the Placencia Peninsula, which is another key tourism destination, running a secondary transmission submarine line from our Independence well site to the Seine Bight Village, which is a little further from Placencia. That creates a double redundancy underground in the submarine line. Now we could safely work on our primary submarine line by looking at the secondary transmission line, having that run water to the peninsula. We’ve also looked at some expansions within that area to try to tie in the whole Placencia Peninsula and not just limited to portions of Seine Bight and portions of Placencia. We’re looking at another 2,000 people receiving water service.
Along with that, we have been working with the government of Belize to look at residential projects that have been undertaken. So far, we’ve done about two residential development projects with the government of Belize, providing some 300 homes with water. These 300 homes are 300 new homes that the government is building primarily on the rural outskirts of the Belize district.
Many countries in the region are experiencing water shortages and have introduced water rationing during the dry season. Do you worry about the availability of water in Belize?
We have been seeing some major effects primarily in the south of the country where the production output of a few of our wells has been significantly lower than where we would expect it to be. We’ve seen salinity intrusion in a few wells, meaning that saltwater has gotten into the system itself so we’ve had to look at additional wells in the area.
As part of our redundancy, we’ve also started investing in storage tanks to ensure that there is at least a two-day storage in each area if there is some reason that we may need to stop production. It gives us enough time to activate the redundancy plan. For example, if you’re reliant on the rivers, our redundancy plan is to have some groundwater sources, some wells, where if we are unable to get water from the river, perhaps due to climate change effect, meaning a severe drought, we would have these wells that we could activate as redundancies to continuously provide water to the country of Belize. We’re working to address the climate change issue by continuously looking at studies and monitoring all water sources and by having redundancies in place, meaning new sources and storage capabilities.
Are measures to reduce and reuse water in place or being considered in Belize?
We are currently looking at a pilot project in water recycling, utilizing the treated water from our Belmopan treatment facility. We had the privilege of being invited to Portugal to look at their water recycling process. With that, we came up with a few pilot projects that we can utilize not only the treated water, the recycled water, but also the treated waste as a form of fertilizer.
Because of the reach of our treatment facilities, meaning that the number of service connections is fairly small, there are not enough bioproducts for us to work with. For example, for biogas utilizing treated waste as a form of biogas, the collection center is not enough and it requires a lot more investment in that area and expansion. It’s a fairly new concept to Belize but it’s something that we are now actively pursuing and ensuring that there is some sort of recovery method from the bioproducts or the waste itself that we are utilizing. As it relates to treated waste and recycled water, a fairly new concept to us, we are looking at projects where this could now be implemented in Belize.
What areas of U.S. investment, know-how, or collaborations could you benefit from at BWS? What is your message to U.S. investors who may be looking at Belize and could offer their expertise in your sector?
Late last year, we had a meeting with the U.S. Embassy investment arm and how BWS could tap into expertise as it relates to renewable energy. We currently have an ongoing financial facility with the Inter American Development Bank that would improve BWS energy consumption, via renewable energy. We just went from diesel fossil fuel to solar energy at our San Pedro water treatment plant and that reduced our costs by 50 percent. It is something that BWS has been pursuing, now looking at renewable energy for all its primary service areas. Our treatment plants will now be powered by renewable energy.
We are currently looking for public-private partnerships to look at a net zero project, where BWS would be investing in solar farms to net off our energy consumption thus moving into a net zero system. Via the solar farms now BWS could generate enough revenue to trade off or net off what is their consumption from the grid. In most areas, we will ensure that there are renewable energy systems in place to reduce the load that we’re currently using. We utilize a lot of energy from the local energy company, primarily in the tourism destinations where desalination plants are. Those are power-hungry machines.
This is one of the projects that we’re currently looking at, where some PPP funding could be injected into the company. It serves a dual purpose. One is the reduction in our expenditure and two, where we could stabilize tariffs and ensure that rates do not keep increasing because now, we have an additional source of revenue that the company will be getting through these solar farms.
What sort of technologies do you use or intend to implement into BWS’ strategies? How is ever smarter technology benefiting the water sector?
About two years ago, we invested in an upgraded customer service and billing system, which would allow more interactivity with our teams on the field. Previously, we had teams coming in, getting job notes and then going out. Now they have some equipment that would provide any job ticket information that they may need, so there’s no need to come back to the office. That is where we started off.
We also invested heavily in GIS and mapping our entire service area. Now we can identify leaks at a faster pace than before. Previously, we would have to go and dig an entire area to look at where the transmission pipe is. Now we have it identified with a very small margin of error in the GIS system itself. We’ve done that.
Third, we looked at SCADA, which is an integration of all of our systems and our monitoring system to look at the production facility to ensure that the chlorine content is adequate and the pH is where the standards need to be. All of this is monitored remotely from all the systems and it’s a 24-hour remote system that we look at.
We’re looking at new sources. We’ve invested in ground penetrating radar systems, which allow us to identify groundwater sources, as well as the type of water and the type of soil formation. That reduces our well explorations significantly. What took about two weeks to do, now takes less than a day to identify the water sources and the completion of the well takes a lot less time. We invested in ground-penetrating radar systems. We’re also looking at satellite imagery to identify leaks in our system. As far as technology is concerned we’ve been trying as best as possible to catch up where we weren’t technologically advanced as before. In the past three years, these are the major advancements that we’ve had with technology and mostly the staff have been very open to accepting these changes.
What is your final message to the readers of Newsweek; why should they come, visit Belize and do business?
Belize is the gem of the Caribbean. We are uniquely placed, meaning that while being in Central America, we also are a Caribbean country. We speak both English and Spanish; you get the best of both worlds in Belize. Aside from its natural beauty, there’s something for everyone. If you’re into nature, if you’re into scuba diving, if you’re into archaeological, historical information. There’s all of that in Belize. Aside from that, we have the Caribbean’s best drinking water. You should definitely visit Belize.
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