Podcast: Water Is Water — And Other Costly Myths

In this episode of Chemical Processing's Distilled podcast, editor-in-chief Traci Purdum speaks with water treatment expert Brad Buecker about the dangers of the "water is water" mindset in industrial settings. Buecker shares real-world examples of costly boiler failures caused by ignoring water chemistry, explains how water's near-universal solvent properties create scaling and corrosion risks and highlights how geography and climate shape treatment needs. He stresses that single water analyses are insufficient — comprehensive, historically collected data is essential for proper system design. The conversation also covers microbiological fouling, Legionella risks and the growing pressure on surface water supplies.

Transcript (edited for clarity)

Welcome to Chemical Processing's Distilled podcast. This podcast and its transcript can be found at chemicalprocessing.com. You can also download this podcast on your favorite player.

I'm Traci Purdum, editor-in-chief of CP. Joining me today is Brad Buecker, who has written several articles for us — many about water and wastewater.

Brad currently serves as senior technical consultant with Samco Technologies and is the owner of Buecker and Associates, LLC. He has many years of experience in or supporting the power industry, much of it in steam generation chemistry, water treatment and air quality control. Brad holds a degree in chemistry from Iowa State University with additional coursework in fluid mechanics, energy and materials balances, and advanced inorganic chemistry.

One of his recent articles opens with a throwback to a 1980s TV commercial — one that I totally remember. It's set in a carpool where the driver, when challenged about which motor oil he uses, growls back: "Motor oil is motor oil." We're going to use that article as the jumping-off point for today's episode. I'll link to the full article in the show notes. Welcome, Brad. Thanks for joining us.

Brad: Thank you, Traci. It's a pleasure to be here.

Traci: You've written for us so many times, and it's about time we got you on the podcast. I'm looking forward to this episode and hearing some of your stories from the industry. Your articles are always fascinating, detailed and resonate with our readers.

Brad: Sounds good. I'll just have to be careful — I can get carried away telling stories.

Traci: I'm here for it. Let's talk about that article. You opened it with that memorable Valvoline commercial to make the point that "motor oil is motor oil" — pairing it with the idea that "water is water" is a dangerous assumption in industry. How often do you still encounter that mindset today, and what does it cost facilities that hold it?

How prevalent is the Water is Water mindset?

Brad: I'm not directly at a plant anymore, but I still see that mindset frequently on LinkedIn and in various articles. In the power industry, there's one issue I see over and over, even though it's been well documented. I regularly see posts where someone comments about steam generation chemistry without distinguishing between industrial and utility steam generators — and the differences matter.

On the utility side, there's a phenomenon called flow-accelerated corrosion. It's been known for about 40 years now, and failures at various plants over those four decades have killed and injured people. Educating steam-generation personnel and water treatment chemical companies has been harder than it should be. I keep seeing these posts and usually comment: you really have to pay attention to your specific situation.

Traci: In the article, you mention that catastrophic boiler tube failures are a real consequence of underestimating water chemistry. Can you walk us through what one of those failure scenarios looks like?

Underestimating Water Chemistry

Brad: Sure. I've got a couple of examples — one from my direct experience and two shorter ones that former colleagues shared with me.

The first comes from my own experience. It involved a power boiler — not a particularly large one, just 1,250 psi, though industrial boilers can run at those pressures or higher. The unit had been down for a scheduled maintenance outage. When it came back up, I was in the lab and we noticed fairly severe contamination of the condensate flowing through the steam generator. Water needs to be quite pure in high-pressure boilers.

We alerted plant management immediately. We knew the cause: some kind of upset or failure in the steam surface condenser. We told them they needed to take the boiler offline. Management said no — they were selling power and couldn't afford the downtime. We kept the chemical treatment as close to spec as we could, but they ran for about three weeks under those conditions before finally shutting down.

Within two to three months, boiler tube failures started appearing — almost daily. When they finally shut the unit down and inspected the tubes, the contamination we'd warned them about had caused numerous failures. The most prominent mechanism was hydrogen damage. They ended up replacing all of the boiler tubes. It was a big cost just to sell a little extra power. It was a hard lesson for everyone, especially management.

The other two examples were relayed to me by colleagues at separate refineries, hundreds of miles apart, so these were unrelated incidents. In both cases, sodium softeners — a very basic process that produces water more than adequate for low- and medium-pressure boilers — malfunctioned. Plant management told the makeup system operators to bypass the softeners and just put raw water in the boilers. That's the water-is-water philosophy in action. In both cases, it caused boiler failures and shutdowns. These are not small problems. If you don't pay attention to makeup water and process water, you're talking serious money — and in the case of flow-accelerated corrosion, potential injury or death.

Traci: Absolutely the ultimate cost. Setting aside the human danger, the money attached to this is staggering — and it seems like such a strange disconnect. Water seems so innocuous. Let's talk about molecular structure: For a plant engineer who may not have thought about chemistry since college, why does water chemistry actually matter?

Brad: At a high level, there's a critical chemistry concept called hydrogen bonding. In a water molecule, oxygen develops a partial negative charge and the hydrogen atoms develop a partial positive charge. Those opposite charges attract each other — not through standard chemical bonds, but through electrostatic attraction. That's hydrogen bonding.

It gives water unique properties that make life as we know it possible. Without hydrogen bonding, water would freeze at much lower temperatures, its boiling point would be different, and countless other properties would change. But one of the most significant effects for industrial purposes is that water will dissolve — at least partially — a wide range of substances. It's often called the closest thing to a universal solvent.

That's exactly what creates problems. Water used for makeup, process cooling and other applications in industrial facilities will pick up dissolved solids and carry them into heat exchangers, steam generators and cooling systems. Those solids can then cause corrosion and scale. In cooling towers, where concentration cycles up due to evaporation, water that seems fairly benign in the makeup supply can generate serious scale — and dissolved compounds that cycle up can drive corrosion. These factors need to be considered at both the design and operations stages. Too often, they're overlooked. It keeps coming back to that water-is-water mindset.

Traci: You mentioned that water is the nearest thing to a universal solvent — a remarkable property, but also very problematic in industrial systems. How do you explain that double-edged nature to clients?

Double-Edge Nature of Water

Brad: I try to share some of those real-world examples — I've only touched on a few here. I spent many years on the industrial side, so when I talk to clients, I draw on things I've actually seen. Colleagues of mine who've also worked in industry do the same thing. Clients tend to open up when they're talking with someone who's been in the trenches.

I'm also a believer that a picture is worth 1,000 words. In presentations and in articles for Chemical Processing, I try to include photographs that graphically illustrate what can happen — because this isn't a one-in-a-million occurrence. If you don't pay attention to conditions, these problems are almost guaranteed to happen.

For flow-accelerated corrosion, the Electric Power Research Institute has published numerous photos showing catastrophic failures of feedwater piping — literally looks like a hand grenade blew out the side of a pipe. That's pretty compelling visual evidence. For cooling water scaling, I've seen photos of a 4-inch cooling water line where repeated scaling has reduced the internal diameter down to roughly 1 inch. You're talking serious fluid flow and heat transfer issues. These aren't isolated incidents. They happen over and over at plants where water chemistry and steam chemistry get pushed to the background.

Traci: Let's talk about geography. You note that the Midwest's limestone geology drives up hardness and bicarbonate alkalinity, while northeastern granite-based geology produces much softer water. How dramatically does geography dictate what a treatment system needs to look like?

Brad: Geography — and climate — can have a major influence. I've spent my whole life in the Midwest. The surface waters here, including man-made lakes built to serve power plants, pick up minerals from limestone deposits in the ground. That introduces hardness and bicarbonate alkalinity. Once that water passes through heat exchangers, the solubility of calcium carbonate is exceeded and it precipitates on internal tube surfaces — even without the concentration cycling of a cooling tower. Calcium carbonate scaling is probably the oldest known scaling problem, going back to whenever humans first started heating water. It's still the No. 1 scale problem today, despite decades of evolving treatment programs.

The Northeast genuinely surprised me when I first started working on projects around the country. The water there is remarkably soft — there simply aren't the same mineral deposits. Soft water can actually cause its own problems. A term sometimes used is "hungry water" — water with very few dissolved minerals that, when circulated through systems, will draw metal ions out of the pipe walls. That has to be managed carefully with the right treatment programs.

In more arid climates where surface water is scarce, facilities often turn to groundwater. Groundwater tends to be more chemically stable than surface water, but being underground — potentially within mineral deposits — it can carry higher concentrations of hardness, bicarbonate alkalinity, silica, dissolved manganese and dissolved iron. All of those need to be accounted for in system design.

There's also the surface water issue I mentioned earlier, which ties into climate variability. Surface water chemistry can change dramatically in both the short and long term — and that connects to something I'd like to come back to.

Traci: You make a strong point that no water treatment system should ever be designed from a single water analysis. How often does that mistake get made, and what does a proper sampling and analysis regimen look like?

Brad: It happens quite often. I saw it directly over several years while working for an engineering, procurement and construction firm — one of the leading EPC firms for combined-cycle power plant construction. Specifications would come in from an outside engineering firm, and my group was responsible for reviewing the water treatment aspects: makeup water, monitoring systems for steam generation chemistry.

We had a standard list of the important items a water analysis should include — major cations and anions, plus a number of minor compounds that can become very important in systems with concentration cycling, such as cooling towers and reverse osmosis systems. On rare occasions, an analysis would come in that was clearly prepared by someone with genuine chemistry knowledge. Most of the time, though, the analyses came from engineers who didn't fully understand the importance of water chemistry. We'd see some of the major ions, very few minor ions, possibly suspended solids — and typically just a single snapshot in time. On a couple of occasions, specifications arrived with no water analysis at all. How do you design to that?

Water chemistry can change dramatically, both short term and long term. A classic Midwest example: a plant drawing from a river, particularly in farming country with a lot of exposed topsoil, can see that river go from clear to essentially mud after a heavy rainstorm. A huge spike in suspended solids can clog and shut down makeup water treatment systems quickly. I actually worked at a chemical plant with a similar situation — they had drilled wells beneath the river, so the water quality was more stable than the surface, but it illustrated the vulnerability. Longer term, lakes and reservoirs turn over in spring and summer, so chemistry changes seasonally.

What's critical is twofold. First, the analysis itself needs to be comprehensive — major and minor ions, suspended solids, the works. Second, for new projects, start sampling as soon as possible. Collect a sample every month or two and build a historical record so the people designing the water treatment system can see how the water behaves over time. I've seen systems designed from even a comprehensive but single analysis that needed significant modifications once the plant started operating because the water had changed. Some systems have had to be removed entirely. Getting comprehensive, historical data isn't just important — it's essential.

Traci: You mentioned that engineers sometimes don't understand the chemistry. How can we help them — or are there fail-safes?

Brad: I do — and I want to be careful not to put all engineers in the same bucket. Some absolutely understand chemistry, and chemical engineers cover quite a bit of it in their curriculum. But I have personally encountered many engineers who, when I mention I was a chemistry major, respond with something like, "Oh, chemistry — I hated that. Couldn't understand it." And I think: you were smart enough to earn an engineering degree. Chemistry isn't harder. For some reason, though, it just hasn't clicked for a significant number of engineers I've met.

My advice to young engineers: pay attention to chemistry coursework. Don't write it off. It will come back in ways you don't expect once you're in the real world. From a broader standpoint, EPC firms and water treatment companies — Samco included — have been pushing on LinkedIn and elsewhere to emphasize the importance of getting comprehensive samples early and often, building that historical data set, and getting it to the design experts before decisions are locked in. Too many times, my colleagues and I at the EPC firm would receive the specifications late in the process, essentially handed a neatly wrapped package with the message: here's what the plant is going to look like, now build it. If we'd had the information earlier — and if the water treatment vendors had been looped in earlier — we could have flagged problems before they got baked into the design. Getting early input from the real experts makes an enormous difference.

Surface Water Challenges

Traci: Let's get back to surface water. What should our audience know?

Brad: There are several issues worth highlighting, particularly for future projects. I'll set aside the climate debate — reasonable people have different views — but there are clearly increasing pressures on surface water availability and quality. In some locations, facilities are already having to explore alternatives to fresh surface water supplies.

California, for example, has mandated that new industrial plants use municipal wastewater treatment effluent as makeup water. That's a significant shift. Even properly treated municipal effluent still contains compounds that can have a dramatic effect on cooling systems and makeup water systems.

Let me give you a concrete example from my first power plant. The plant used a man-made lake that had been in existence for about 50 years. All of the units had once-through condensers — inlet water passed through the condenser tubes, picked up heat as steam condensed, then returned to the lake. Scaling had never been a problem in those condensers. In the spring and summer of 1988, that area of the Midwest experienced a severe heat wave — literally no rain, with actual temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Traci: I remember that summer.

Brad: My colleagues monitored lake water chemistry weekly throughout the drought. The concentration of ions in the water increased roughly fourfold over the summer — essentially behaving like a cooling tower at four cycles of concentration. I was responsible for monitoring condenser performance at the time, and I noticed it dropping off. It wasn't microbiological fouling. When temperatures finally cooled and we could open the units, we found calcium carbonate scaling in the condensers — something that had never occurred before — driven by a combination of the drought concentrating the ions and the heat amplifying the conditions. That's a clear-cut example of how surface water can change dramatically based on climate conditions alone.

Traci: Great visual — and something you'd never expect. Expect the unexpected.

Brad: Right. And building on that: one issue that's often overlooked, even at plants where experienced people are on the job, is microbiological fouling. Water contains all kinds of microbes, and cooling towers are effective air scrubbers — anything airborne, dust, cottonwood seeds, microbes, all of it ends up in the cooling system.

It's critically important to have biocide feed systems in place and operating properly. In northern climates, this matters less in the winter months. But from spring through early fall — and year-round in warmer climates — if you don't kill microbes while they're still in the planktonic form, floating freely in the water, they will settle on internal surfaces. Once settled, some microbes form a protective layer that gradually builds into a slime layer — technically a polysaccharide. That slime captures additional material and can develop into complex microbiological colonies that resist biocide treatment and cause heat transfer problems, fluid flow restrictions and under-deposit corrosion.

And in advanced cases, Legionella bacteria will proliferate, creating the risk of Legionnaires' disease. This isn't just a problem in industrial cooling systems — it's a concern wherever cooling towers are used.

Here's a story I like to tell. In 1976, when Legionnaires' disease first came to public attention at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, roughly 30 Legionnaires died and many more fell ill. My parents were actually staying at that hotel at the same time for a different event. My mom called and mentioned that my dad seemed to have come down with the flu. It wasn't until they were home and the reports started coming out that they figured out what he'd likely contracted. He was healthy and recovered, but it brought that risk very close to home for me. And years later, when I worked at the power plant and we'd crawl into the water side of condensers to inspect tubes and water boxes during maintenance outages — who knows what we were exposed to? There are a lot of angles to think about when it comes to water.

Traci: Brad, you've given us plenty of angles to think about. This has been a masterclass in water, and I appreciate the time and the stories. Audience members, if you want to stay on top of best practices in the chemical industry, subscribe to this free podcast via your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit chemicalprocessing.com for more tools and resources. On behalf of Brad, I'm Traci — and this is Chemical Processing Distilled. Thanks for listening. Thanks again, Brad.

Brad: Thank you so much.