The oil business uses a large quantity of water during the drilling and completion of an unconventional gas well. In many of the shale plays each well needs in excess of 4 million gallons of water (100,000 bbl) during the drilling and completions operations. Water is a precious resource and many areas are faced with water shortages. Water shortages extend to almost all the traditional oil and gas producing areas in the United States including Colorado, California, Wyoming, Texas and Oklahoma. Also, the arid areas of Australia, The Middle East, and Africa see even more severe shortages of fresh water than in the United States. Moreover, in areas where water is not in short supply such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Eastern United States, discharge of high salt content water is problematic. In order to assure itself of adequate water for drilling and completion operations, the oil business needs to change the ways it has traditionally transacted its business. As stated above many drilling areas are faced with water shortages, whereas many other producing areas are faced with high disposal costs for frac flow back water and produced water. In many traditional production areas disposal of water is simple and usually inexpensive since there are numerous injection wells in these traditional production areas. However, in some of the new Shale plays the access to injection wells for disposal of produced water and frac flow back water is very limited. Part of the solution is to recycle the frac flow back water and the produced water for use as drilling fluid or for Frac Fluid. How clean does this water need to be for use as a drilling fluid or a frac fluid? What techniques are used to clean this water? How costly are the various techniques? These questions and others will be addressed in this paper.
From the point-of-view of a solutions provider the wastewater treatment should be straight forward: once given the composition of the feed and the required composition of the effluent, today's technology allows formulating a set of solutions which best meets the operator's and the regulatory criteria. The problem with wastewater in the unconventional gas exploration and production operations is that there are large volumes to be handled and treated. To add complexity, composition varies for the same well in time and varies even more from area to area of development. Also, the requirements for the cleaned fluid vary from operator to operator and by region. Moreover, management of the water based fluids is under the pressure and scrutiny of various regulating agencies: public, privately, or governmentally run. All these constraints make the vetting of treatment methods and technologies to be a very dynamic and intensive process. Our findings during the process of formulating a set of solutions shows that a deep understanding of the problems, combined with close collaboration with the operators and regulators along with solid basic engineering practices are the key to success. Our experience would benefit the new developments in other unconventional exploration and production area in Asia by showing the steps that were undertaken to insure solutions are up to the highest standards. The process of finding and testing various waste water treatment technologies to formulate a flexible comprehensive set of methods will be described. Laboratory results of various samples of water will be presented as well as the challenges that were overcome for obtaining consistent, reliable analytical data. The oilfield tough requirement presented to new technologies translates as: rugged, flexible, mobile, and low cost.
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