[00:00:00] Speaker A: Altogether, for that batch of 787 utilities that we looked at this time, it's about $345 billion of total planned capital investments through 2032.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: I am Reese Tisdall, and this is future of water, which we talk about all the ways which companies, utilities and people are addressing the challenges and opportunities in water. Welcome to episode number 103 of the Future Water podcast, and I know it's going to be a good one. That is because today I'm joined by Bluefield's Eric Bentler, senior research director, and he and a team of Bluefield water experts have been doing some interesting analysis. They have dug into water, wastewater and stormwater capital improvement plans across approximately 800 utilities in the US and Canada. We at Bluefield do this every year. We dig into these utilities, their project plans, their budgets, and we take all the data that they provide so kindly and we categorize it. We throw all these projects into as many as 48 different categories. So this allows business development teams, strategic directors or directors of strategy, should I say, with companies, engineering firms understand whats happening down on the ground when it comes to the prioritization of certain types of projects without getting into a lot of detail, because Eric Bindler is going to do that in a little bit and he can shed a lot of light into whats happening. But before we do that, youre going to have to bear with me and let me talk about whats caught my attention this past week.
Across the US, a network of underground infrastructure which is comprised of 2.2 million mile of drinking water distribution pipes and another 1.8 or so million miles of wastewater collection pipes. These serve what is the connected population in the US. They are significant amount of the capital as well as operating spend in the US. We've heard numbers from 270,000 main breaks a year to 300,000 main breaks year. So that number is originated from the EPA. But one thing weve done at Bluefield is weve done some interesting analysis thats just come out this past week on the us pipe market, competitive trends, market share, and it highlights significant market shifts driven by, really the scale and demand for new and rehabilitated pipe networks. In our last forecast, we estimated that the pipe market was worth about $176 billion in projected capex through 2030. That's admittedly being updated as we speak, and the market's seeing considerable consolidation as a result. There's an opportunity here and there's some diversification of materials going into the ground for various reasons, which we'd be more than happy to dig into with you. And there's also increased focus on things like climate resilience and sustainability that are influencing decision making in different parts of the country. So why should the industry care? Well, I just wanted to point out a couple different things. One is that Bluefield had identified about 153 companies producing pipe. About 435 facilities across the US. There's a wide range of materials being used at 24% of these facilities are focusing on plastic pipes, another 41% on concrete, the other 13% on steel or iron, ductile iron. And then theres some other categories as well, focusing on everything, things like fiberglass and as well as clay. But I thought this was interesting. There is a lot happening in this space and as a result were also seeing major deals. So going back as far as 2022, quikrete it acquired us for terror or us pipe. Then also CRHs acquisition of Hydro International and Hancock concrete in 2023. These deals enable companies to expand their portfolios, increase market share, but also better serve utilities with a wider range of products to serve their diverse infrastructure needs. Then lastly, there has been a shift towards materials like lighter weight materials like HDPE PVC, but they also have been combined with a focus on climate resilience solutions. So companies are moving in this direction and for that reason we're starting to see some new market entrants. This report that we've just put out I thought was really interesting. I know our sales team loves it, I know they're talking to a number of different people right now. But this market share report delves into the current state of the us municipal pipe sector, not only uncovering key trends, overseeing the market, talking about market drivers, but a big part of this is the competitive landscape. It's a big share of the analysis and it provides detailed analysis of things like what share of the market do these companies have? And it profiles 20 leading companies offering a comprehensive view of the future direction of the sector. So if you made it this far, you can always, I'll just let you know, you can always go to bluefieldresearch.com and get more information on that. You can also reach out to us at water expertsluefieldresearch.com dot to uh, ask any questions. And before we get to Eric, one last thing. I'm going to be a weftech in New Orleans next month, so, yeah, apart from meetings, presentations with clients, uh, we want to meet you. So ping us if you're interested. We'll be at the same address. What are
[email protected]? dot these are good events for us. We like being there and it's also a good place to meet in person. As I've said before, I like to do that oftentimes they are more efficient. Also just putting a name with a face. So let us know if you're going to be a weft hack. We want to meet you. That being said, let's get Eric Bindler and let's talk a little bit about capital improvement plans in the US and Canada.
All right, so I'm joined here by Eric Bindler. Eric, how good is it been?
[00:06:15] Speaker A: It's been busy. The daughter just started daycare, so we immediately got sick and, you know, kind of dealing with, with that. Been an interesting couple days, but we're, we're making through it.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: Well, I'm going to bum you out here. Um, you're going to be sick until she's six or seven years old.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm getting that impression. Yeah.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: At that point, immunity, immunity builds up and then, uh, you're more or less in the clear.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Right, right. Yeah, we got a ways to go.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: I did notice that you didn't sound so great on the, on the call this morning.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: So I didn't know if we were going to get to this podcast. So thanks for, uh, thanks for suffering through.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Apologies for any, you know, if I sound kind of funky, but should be, should be okay. I'm mostly through it. She's already fine and back to normal and I still am sitting here with a lingering, you know, tickle in my throat, but I'll be okay.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: All right, so for all the listeners out there, Bluefield research has problems too.
So, but what we are trying to do is solve some problems with some of the research we put out of. And as I've talked a little bit about in the intro, we've talked about capital improvement plans. We've just done a huge exercise. We do this every year.
We actually bring people in, we scrub data across 100, 800 or so different utilities and look at their plans and actually go even a step or two further and categorize the data, what it all means, what their budgets look like going forward. But we'll get to those questions in just a minute, but just for the listeners. So if theyre new to this podcast, theyre new to Bluefield research. Lets talk a little bit about what our capital improvement plans and why are they essential for utilities in this case in the US and Canada?
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah, no, so I think super important topic to be kind of looking at. Weve been doing this work in one form or another for, I mean, as long as ive been at Bluefield. It was literally the first thing I did as an intern seven years ago. So this is a topic thats definitely near and dear to my heart. So just in a nutshell, CIPS capital improvement plans, as you said, are basically detailed financial plans that are used by municipal governments, local governments, utilities in this case, in many cases, to basically kind of allocate their resources for future infrastructure projects, typically over a multi year period. As we'll talk about a little bit, the time horizons for different utilities or different municipalities can vary quite a bit, in some cases one or two years, as far as, you know, as long as ten years out. It really kind of varies by utility. But I ultimately, they provide a couple benefits for utilities. They provide kind of a structured approach, kind of a framework for long term infrastructure planning, right. They let utilities really kind of spread out their larger capital investment needs over several years while making sure that they are kind of addressing those critical infrastructure kind of investment needs and priorities, as well as broader community goals and objectives. Right. It's not just utilities that are doing this. It's also parks departments and city police departments and fire departments. And so it's kind of balancing between all of those different municipal objectives and optimizing or prioritizing those investments over a long term period. And again, hitting on things like public health, economic development, sustainability, environmental health, all of those things are kind of priorities that utilities or municipalities can really make sure that the investments that they're making and the projects that they're doing year to year are speaking to or supporting those longer term goals and priorities. They also help utilities, again, to that point, prioritize individual projects, replacing this line of pipe at this address, or rehabilitating this piece of equipment at the treatment plant, putting all of those projects and those needs in a framework and matching them with specific revenue or funding sources based on, again, the timelines for specific projects, the range of pressures or priorities that they're trying to meet.
A lot of it comes down to just replacing or upgrading or rehabilitating aging infrastructure, meaning changing regulatory compliance needs, addressing maybe new or emerging challenges in the sector, like water quality or PFAS, for example, or climate resilience or cybersecurity. Again, really taking all of those different issues and factors and problems and pressures that utilities are facing and trying to prioritize what the investments are going to look like to address those issues simultaneously. And then I guess the third thing is really, they're a key mechanism for kind of public transparency, as well as just getting buy in from the community getting buy in from potential funding sources. Basically by publishing these long lists of projects and investments and priorities, utilities are kind of showing their communities how they're putting their I, their tax dollars to work, their revenue dollars to work, their bond dollars to work, their federal government grant or loan dollars to work, and really kind of opening that dialogue with their community around. This is what were trying to accomplish. And this is the plan that we have to kind of get these things done.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think the last point about public transparency, thats the beauty of it, because it allows us to look at it. Right.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: We know where they are. We know how theyre organized, how theyre structured. And its probably worth pointing out is that theyre all structured very differently. So it takes a lot of work on our end. So really the question is, while were in the water sector, broadly speaking, as I say, were always looking at data, trying to read the tea leaves, so to speak, why do we look at these cips every year? Whats the value that were bringing to the table, at least when we do this?
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, these are really one of the cornerstones of our, especially our municipal, US and Canada Municipal water research service. And I think they provide value at a couple of different levels. I mean, at the individual utility level or even individual project level. Basically what these plans do is they kind of translate utilities, like I said, broader capital needs and priorities and objectives into very specific, very discreet, identifiable projects or really market opportunities for vendors, for service providers. If we're talking about engineering and design firms, construction companies, tech providers, software companies, all of these types of firms will find themselves represented in some way in the plans and the investments that utilities are making. And so it's basically what we're able to deliver by going through these CIPs is really a list of upcoming projects that vendors, technology and service providers can get in front of and plan for and make sure that they're bidding on or maybe even getting further upstream, getting into the specification phase, and making sure that their products and services are going to be included in these projects. And so it's a really very targeted list of market opportunities, basically over a ten year time horizon that our clients are water and wastewater technology and service provider clients, really find a lot of value in just having that list of potential opportunities, being able to search by state or by project type or by utility, and just understanding what those opportunities look like coming up over time. The other piece of it is that more of an aggregate scale. I mean, whats really interesting, like I said, a lot of our clients use these to identify specific sales opportunities, but we get the benefit of looking at the full data set and saying whats actually changing if we look at these things year over year. As I said, weve been doing this for a couple of years now in the current form for about four years. We can look and say we're hearing a lot, maybe anecdotally, about utilities becoming more interested or more concerned with this issue or that issue, whether it be PFAS or cybersecurity or climate stormwater. We hear these things, but the cips really give us an opportunity to see how that's actually translating into investment plans. Do we actually see growth in this particular type of project or that particular type of project? What do the dollars look like relative to other categories that we track that maybe have been part of utilities investment plans for a longer period of time? Thats super valuable. Its also really valuable. To help inform our top down capex forecasts, we can actually look at a lot of individual project examples to say, what does it cost to build a new treatment plant? Or what does it cost to install a metering system for a utility of this size or that size? So there's a ton of valuable data in there. And then maybe, I guess the last thing as far as why do we do it specifically, there is a tremendous value add for our clients in the sense that, again, these are publicly available documents in the interest of transparency. They're published by utilities all around the country, but they're just super messy. It's really difficult to wrangle them all into a common format. Every utility is different in terms of how they format these documents, how granular they get in terms of the project descriptions or line items, how many years of budget they provide, where the water wastewater stuff is embedded in the larger city government budget. And so basically, over time, we've been kind of developing and I'd say refining or perfecting this methodology to collect these things, find the relevant lines of information, scrub it all, get it into a common format. We've got this kind of extensive system of, of categories that we use to say this project is a treatment plant project or a hydrant project or a metering project, and get it into a format that's really usable to start delivering both those granular insights around what are specific utilities doing and what are those specific project opportunities look like. But also the higher level kind of market trends that we're able to pull out as well so that clients don't have to do it themselves. Right. That's the name of the game. We do it so that our clients don't have to.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I think. Exactly. I think that's a really good point. And I think, you know, you mentioned one thing that's interesting is where we can carve out or slice off key parts of data. I think one sort of standout among those, or in that comment at least, is digital projects. Right? So we have a digital water service. So we're actually kind of piggybacking the digital service piggybacks off of this exercise in the us municipal space where our digital water clients, they actually have their own dashboard and their own list of projects which have been classified or categorized as digital and include anything from SCADA systems to meters to whatever the list may be. It goes on and on. So I think there's value add as well. That's a really good example of that. And I agree, it's probably maybe the most popular for business development teams, whether it be for engineering companies, construction companies, but also hardware vendors as well. And it does give some insight into what's happening in the market. So let's talk a little bit about. This is my last report. Focus. I want to get into the interesting stuff that the data tells us when it comes to the methodology. What have we looked at? How do we break it out and what sort of categories? Can you give us some insights into that?
[00:17:31] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So this time around, we looked at about 787 water, wastewater and stormwater utilities across the US and Canada. We've kind of added a couple utilities, a couple dozen utilities every year, just really based on client kind of feedback and requests and trying to build out or enhance our coverage of markets that are getting more popular among our clients. But we have at least one, if not multiple utilities represented in basically every us state, plus DC. In some cases, we've got over 100 utilities in some of the more popular states like Texas or California, plus eight canadian provinces. Right. So this is a full regional exercise, not just the US. We've got a pretty good representation of Canada as well in terms of the kind of range of utilities. Like, I mean, we're talking basically at the largest, like nine or 10 million population served. So city of New York, for example, down to maybe 10,000. The Red River Authority in Texas is one of the smaller ones that we have. So again, we try to get as much as we can, kind of a broad cross section of utilities. Obviously, when we're talking about, you know, the north american utility landscape, I mean, just the US alone, it's 50,000 drinking water utilities, 20,000 wastewater utilities. We don't have everybody, but we do have a lot of the biggest ones, and I'd say a decent representation of kind of the mid sized onto down to the, maybe the smaller ones as well. Overall, the utilities that we're looking at serve about 245 million people for what that's worth. So again, pretty decent sample size as far as at least the large to mid size utilities around the region this year. With that batch of utilities that we've looked at, we've got about 45,000 projects covered every year. It changes a little bit just based on what utilities we're looking at and how many we have. But 45,000 projects, 40 to 45,000 per year is generally what we're looking at. And like I said earlier, we basically categorize each one of those projects. We look at the description, we look at both kind of the title of the project, but also any additional information that's provided in the CIP documents to try to classify it. And so we've got about 48 distinct categories and subcategories that we use. So first of all, is it water, is it wastewater, is it stormwater? Just at a high level? And then we go down into, is it a treatment plant related project? Is it related to pipe networks? Is it pumper lift stations? Or is it something more specific like PFAS or desalination metering green infrastructure? We've got all of those kind of key categories carved out in our methodology, and we've been adding them. I mean, the PFAS led service line categories we've just added in the past, maybe two years, we've kind of been expanding the range of digital software and technology categories that we've been using. So we try to stay responsive to the market and to what our clients are interested in to make sure that we're really drilling down and identifying those projects and those opportunities. Then the last thing I'll say as far as the scope or the methodologies that Reese, as you alluded to a minute ago, all of this data is basically available in our data Navigator platform. The top line totals, the individual utility totals, but also all of those individual projects. You can actually download a list of all 45,000 projects and look at who's doing what, where are they doing it, when are the dollars expected to be spent over their budget horizons and things like that? This current budget cycle covers basically 2024 to 2032, but we have been doing this in this format since 2021. So you can actually go back in the platform and look at how each utilitys budget has changed from 21 to 22 to 23 to 24, where the priorities are shifting from year to year and maybe how Covid or inflation or things like that have actually impacted the projected or budgeted spending levels for each of these utilities.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: Yeah, there's no doubt the organizational process, which actually you had a lot to do with, like you said seven years ago, we were looking at about 50 to 75 of them, I think. Okay, so 50 of them. And then we did that for several years. And then we actually had a client who came to us and requested that we dig a little deeper, not only in different categories, but also just the breadth of coverage. So we've gotten up to 787. And I think we've actually looked at more than that. One of the challenges is they're not published every year in some cases, so there may be lagging reports that come out or they're just not, they do it every couple of years. So that's one of the reasons the number is not clean and neat. Therefore it stands at 787. So let's dig into the numbers. So what's interesting, what did we find at least in this last exercise?
[00:22:07] Speaker A: Yeah. So altogether for that batch of 787 utilities that we looked at this time, it's about $345 billion of total planned capital investments through 2032. And so on an annual basis, the kind of peak of the dataset right now is 2025. We're looking at about $66 billion of kind of planned CIP investment that falls off to maybe nine or $10 billion by kind of 2031, 2032, the end of the period. When we show people that exhibit sometimes or that graphic, it's like, whoa, what's going on? The market is just falling off a cliff. And that's not the case. Really what it is, is we basically take the budget data that utilities are giving us. The majority of utilities only provide anywhere from one to maybe three to five years worth of data. Actually, about two thirds of the utilities we look at provide budgets for five years or less, whereas the other third, the other about 34% budget from between six to ten years out. Right. And so basically what happens is the further out you get from the present, the fewer and fewer utilities are actually providing budgets for that year. And so the overall spend kind of falls off. So its important when you see that curve in our report, the report that accompanies this for what its worth is available for registrants on our website. Its free. So go out there and check it out. But if you see that exhibit, dont worry, were not projecting that us water, wastewater market is going to collapse. It's just because we're taking exactly the projects and the budgets that were being given by each utility. So that's kind of the top line, right? 345 billion, 66 billion in 2025. It's also worth thinking about. Like I mentioned, since we've been doing this historically, we've started to build up more of a historical data set of budgets. We can actually go back and look at how these budgets have changed over time. And so since we do add more utilities every year, the list changes a little bit from year to year. This time around, for example, we had some clients asking about Arizona and Florida and the Pacific Northwest. And so we added another couple dozen utilities to round out those markets a little bit more. But we thought itd be interesting just to take a more apples to apples perspective and just look at, theres about 650 utilities that weve looked at every single year for the past four years back to 2021. And we thought, okay, well why dont we just look at those 650 and see how have their budgets evolved in the past four years. And the top line is that theyve increased by a total of about 30% or basically 10% per year back to 2021. So pretty significant increase in planned spending that these utilities are putting out there. And I think that may be not surprising, right. If you think about whats happened since 2021, since kind of still very much the middle of the COVID pandemic, we've seen significant supply chain shocks that have really hit the water industry hard in a lot of ways. Just the broader inflationary environment that we now as of yesterday are starting to see interest rates come back down, but inflation has been rampant in the sector since 2021 or so. And so I think the budgets reflect that. But we're also seeing obviously much tighter regulatory requirements. We're seeing a lot more attention around lead and PFAS. That's really driving investment and planned activity for utilities. And then just on the flip side of that, the greater availability of federal infrastructure funding, right, the IAJA and the US, all of the dollars associated with that, theres more money out there for utilities to potentially spend. And so theyre kind of trying to budget for that or take that into account as theyre kind of updating their capital budgets every year.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think this is interesting. I mean, these are big numbers, 345 billion in total. And like you said, its bit of a curve, right? It sort of rises up to 2025 at 66 billion and then starts tailing off. And thats really reflective of the number of utilities reporting and also utilities dont budget that far out. Right. Theyre more near term in their capital focus.
You could straight line it out and obviously that number would be pretty significant. And 66 billion for 787 utilities is a lot of money. But that means, like you said, there are another 70 or so thousand utility water, wastewater, stormwater utilities out there that have budgets. These are the big fish in many respects. And so, but that's also where most of the dollars are being spent. Do we expect all of this to get spent according to plan? I mean, is this the word of God or some God or someone's God offensive? I'm talking around it, but yeah. Is this written in stone? Is it a better way to put it?
[00:26:52] Speaker A: No. Yeah, it absolutely is not. I mean, it's a really good question, and it's one that we get a lot from our clients when they're looking at this data. Just, okay, this is great. This is really helpful to understand where utility priorities are. But is this what's actually going to happen? How does this compare to what actually does get spent in the sector in a given year? And so it's a question that prompted me and some of the other work that I'm doing for our municipal capex forecast to start trying to figure it out, because again, it is a really great data source, but just understanding what is the realistic expectation around CIP attainment, let's call it CIP budget attainment versus projections each year. And it's tough. I mean, most utilities don't actually provide that information. It's, you know, there's a small minority that we've noticed. As we've been looking at these things more and more year over year, we're starting to notice some of these really interesting tidbits that you can find in some, maybe 10% of CIPs or 5% of CIPs. You know, sometimes you can even find the names of the project managers associated with each project or, you know, what type of delivery method are they going with? Are they doing a design build or progressive design build for this project or that project? So there are these really interesting kind of pieces of data that we can pull out for a small group of utilities, and one of those is the actuals, right, the kind of prior year actual spending. So youll be looking at the 2024 budget, and theyll tell you, heres the budget for this project from 24th through 2028, and then heres how much we actually spent in 2023. Right. So ive been going and looking through some of those numbers for just kind of a small subset of utilities to try to get a sense for what that average kind of attainment rate looks like. And it's come into about 60%. Right. So typically what I'm seeing is that utilities spend about 60% of their budgeted CIP value in a given year on average, and then the other 40% would kind of get kicked into the next year. Right. I mean, that's what happens with a lot of this, is things get delayed, things don't go according to plan. And so the projects get kind of pushed on into the next year. And so, yeah, about 60% spent, although in some cases, I've seen some individual utilities as low as like 25, 30, 40% for their CIP kind of attainment, at least, at least in the years that I was looking at. So it's important. I mean, again, this is not set in stone. It is a good roadmap. It's a good guide to where utilities are looking. But again, a project that's expected to get off the ground is actually not going to go until the next year. They have to move things around. Maybe some sort of priority kind of pops up that they weren't expecting mid year. There's some majority know, failure of an asset or something that they need to respond to, and that takes priority.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: Yeah, but I think if you're a vendor, let's say, and you go to a utility, let's just say San Antonio, you can go and using our data, you can at least walk in, educated on what they were planning for at the beginning of the year and understand what their planning priorities were at the time of the documentation and use that as part of the conversation. So in a way, it may not be perfect, but it also provides some ammunition for conversation to better understand what their challenges are. So how do these break down? Let's sort of get to the details that, you know, like you said, we've broken it up, you know, across 48 different categories, subcategories.
How does it break down? What types of projects are projected to see the bulk of spending? And do we have any idea whats driving those investments?
[00:30:28] Speaker A: Steven? Yeah, sure. If we take that 345 billion number that I mentioned earlier, which is again, the total planned investment through 2032 for the utilities that weve looked at, were looking at, about 46% of that is for drinking water. About 44% of that is wastewater. So theyre pretty close. Wastewater sometimes will kind of nudge out ahead a little bit, sometimes water, but they're generally close to each other in these budgets. And then about 9% for stormwater, which is pretty in line with past year trends as well. When you look at that total, if we go a layer deeper down to look at the specific types of projects or assets that are seeing, the investment pipes are about a third. So distribution and collection pipe networks account for about a third of the total. Water. Wastewater treatment plants account for about a quarter of the total. So those are by far the two biggest categories. Everything else is 5% or smaller of total. And when were talking about those kind of core infrastructure investments, pipe networks, plants, pump and lift station storage assets, things like that, id say the reasons, the rationales behind those projects can really vary significantly by system, but some of the most common ones that we see would be basically building out new assets or maybe upgrading existing assets, expanding the capacity of existing assets, response to just growing demand, right? I mean, especially in parts of the country where we're seeing a lot of demographic growth, we're seeing a lot of kind of economic or industrial growth, we're seeing more stress put on water and wastewater infrastructure and resources. And so utilities are having to respond to kind of increase the capacity of their overall system. So that would be one reason. Another definitely is kind of the aging infrastructure question, right? A lot of these investments are related to either replacing or rehabilitating existing assets that are getting older, that are having some challenges, increasing regulatory requirements as well. So certainly things like PFAS or sewer overflows is where were seeing that drive significant amount of the investment in some of these core assets, and then just this broader focus overall on resilience. And that can mean a lot of things. It can mean climate resilience, it can mean cybersecurity resilience or cyber resilience. But even especially out west, you see these investments in seismic protections for pipe network networks or for treatment plants to try to harden the infrastructure against things like earthquakes. Right? So that's maybe some of the higher level drivers and trends. But again, as we've continued to do this exercise and we continue to kind of evolve our methodology, we're trying to capture more and more categories, maybe more niche categories that are a relatively small share of the total, but they're growing quickly, or they're seeing more attention.
We're getting more questions about them from our clients, right? And so things like lead service line, cybersecurity, PFAS, or maybe some of the biggest, the three that come to mind. And so just to throw a couple more numbers out there before I take a breath on the lead service line front, we saw 53 of the utilities that we looked at actually earmarked capital improvement plan funding for lead service line projects. About $3 billion total in planned investment just for those 53 utilities, which is about a 54% increase from last year. So thats a category where we saw a lot more specific, explicitly identified lead service line related projects. Similar cybersecurity is another case where again it's become a really hot topic in the industry over the past couple of years really since COVID And so what we saw was this year about 65 utilities had explicit cybersecurity investments in their cips. About 150 million total compared to about 42 utilities and about 115 million total in 2023.
Something like maybe around a 40 50% increase in those as well.
PFAS is another one. In this year we had about 40 utilities, about $186 million in PFAS related projects, mostly coming from Colorado and Ohio. Interestingly which Colorado in particular we dont necessarily see as a hotspot for PFAS. But for whatever reason were seeing some of those at least calling that out in their budgets. And just because a utility doesnt say PFAS doesn't mean they're not doing it. Obviously it might be embedded in a larger treatment plan expansion or even a new treatment plant construction project. But again we're trying to basically take the titles and the descriptions of these projects as granular as they get from the utility and assign them to a category.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: Yeah there's so much detail in these things, it's hard to believe. And I know we've sort of laid out some fun things. Fun I dont know if we might think. But interesting, better way to put it. But one of the questions always comes up is definitely internally is who are some of the big spenders and what are the stories behind some of these larger budgets? Where are we seeing it happening?
[00:35:21] Speaker A: Yeah so I mean thats another slide if you download the report and again I would encourage you to anybody listening, you can just go on the website, complimentary access if you register on our site and you'll see one of the exhibits in there is basically the top I think 20 or 25 utilities in the list. Kind of the leaderboard right. And so on the one hand it's really not that surprising. I mean basically the utilities that serve the biggest cities, the biggest metro areas across the US and Canada are generally the ones with the biggest budgets right. So City of New York, 9.5 million service population is just by far the biggest spender from a CIP perspective. They've got just alone that utility, about 25 billion in planned spending through 2032. And they're actually one of the relatively few utilities that actually do budget that far out. So you can see projects for New York all the way out to 2032, whereas some of the other leaderboard utilities aren't going that far out. But some of the others in the top five or ten would be cities like Toronto, the region of Peel, Metro Vancouver, which are all big canadian utilities.
And then in the US, you've got San Francisco Puc, you've got city of Houston or kind of the top five or six. So again, generally it corresponds to population, but certainly not always. I mean, in particular in the US with wastewater utilities, we've consistently found, as we've been doing this, that wastewater utilities that are under EPA consent decree for sewer overflows are really often at the high end of the scale in terms of how much they're their budgeting and their cips. And that makes sense, right? I mean, part of these consent decree, the deal is basically that a utility gets hit with a consent decree, they kind of agree that theyll spend sometimes hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars in mitigation efforts over typically maybe a five or 15 or 20 year period. And so Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee, is, I think, number seven on our overall leaderboard, driven in large part by basically about 300 or so million dollars per year that they're planning on spending on just sewer system rehabilitation to eliminate their overflows following a 2009 consent decree. Right. So you get these very clear examples of maybe even mid sized or not the tier one, like million plus served cities. But I think Nashville is something like 600,000 people that are up there with the New Yorks and the Houstons and the Toronto's, just because they've got these massive sewer kind of investment programs that they need to carry out to meet the terms of their consent decrees. I guess maybe a couple more data points to throw out just for listeners interest. If you look across the database as a whole, it's something like $169 per capita on average for drinking water, about 154 per capita for wastewater, and about 48 per capita for stormwater annually. Those are the averages. As far as what do you expect a typical utility to be spending based on its population? Although, again, some of these utilities under consent decree can spend well over $1,000 per person on their water wastewater infrastructure.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, like I said, lots to unpack. I think you brought it up. And we've put together a deck of sort of the high level takeaways methodology, how we did it, what we're looking at state by state, at least it's a complimentary deck and it's on our website. So we're inviting you to come check it out because even that alone might be useful. If you want more information, you can always reach out to us.
Obviously, Eric is at your beck and call as well, the rest of our team. So sorry, I didn't mean to throw.
[00:39:06] Speaker A: You out there, but just give my cell phone number. It's fine.
[00:39:10] Speaker B: So. All right, well, you sort of answered my questions. You got it. What I was hoping we would do and provided a lot of, I think, useful details. So before I let you go, what else you got going on? What are you working on? And maybe also think you have some travel coming up sometime soon or is that in October? I can't remember.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess I do. So as far as what I'm working on, big part of my focus has been on forecasts. We got our digital, our US and Canada digital water forecast out the door. Not too long ago, were working on Europe digital. Weve got a few industrial forecast reports that are in the works as well. Me personally spending a lot of time on our municipal capex and Opex forecasts. And really a lot of it is actually using the CIP data. Like I said, theres a ton of really interesting, really valuable data to try to get at what is an average treatment plant rehabilitation project look like for a city of 100,000 people. What does that mean? How do we tie that into our broader understanding of what's happening in kind of the market as a whole and build out some forecast assumptions around that? So really been digging through this data a lot lately to try to build out some of those assumptions and put our forecast model together. So that's number one. And probably when that's ready, I'll be back on the show to talk about the capex forecast and what we're finding there, but the travel piece of it.
[00:40:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: So I'm going to, I think we're going to Houston for a company event for a couple days. And then maybe the week before that, I'll be in a Miami, at the association of Metropolitan Water Agencies executive management conference at the end of October. So events ive not been to before. Looking forward to checking them both out.
[00:40:52] Speaker B: Right on. And I will be at Weftech in your stead. And if you want to talk about this at Weftech, ill be there. But if youre going to be definitely at the ammo event in Miami, be nice to be in Miami. Eric will be there, so take advantage of that. But like I said, you know, we're here to help out, answer any questions. If you're listening to this podcast, that in and of itself would make us happy. So all right, Eric, I will set you free and we can catch up again later and look forward to having you on again soon.
[00:41:24] Speaker A: Sounds good. Thanks, Reese. Talk to you soon.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: All right, that's wrap for 103rd episode. Thanks for being a part of the journey. I'm going to say that over and over again, I think. But we're excited about the future of the water industry and the innovations that lie ahead. It's not a problem. It's an opportunity. That's the way we look at it at Bluefield Research. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing it. So as long as it's an opportunity, people will focus on it. People will see ways to innovate and deploy new solutions. And we hope that these discussions that I'm having with Bluefield's team of water experts are insightful and that they're useful to you and your friends and colleagues. So please share any episodes you find interesting with your friends. So here's to the next what would that mean? 97 episodes of the Future Water podcast. Given where we are now, before we sign off, if you're in Boston, Barcelona, California, Chicago, wherever we have people, New York, Paris, let us know and we'd enjoy the opportunity for a meeting. Also, if you are in New York for climate Week, I will be there Tuesday, which is the day this is dropping. So you could go to the rethinking water event at Columbia University on the 24 September. After hearing this, you can run down there, but also I will be a weftech more importantly, and Eric will be at the ammo event in Miami, so be on the lookout for us there. Please subscribe to the Future Water podcast and give us a review. Send us a note to what are expertsluefieldresearch.com with any topic ideas that you'd like us to discuss. We're doing this for you. And lastly, tell a friend about it. Like I just said, if you think it's useful to them and they'd be interested, it's useful to us, particularly if they're listening to the podcast. This podcast and these water industry insights have been brought to you by the one and only Bluefield research. To learn more about us, visit us. Have bluefieldresearch.com till we talk again. Be well, be safe, and take care.
