Water Recycling Helps with Sustainability

Abstract

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.

Using water‐miscible nonionic hydrophobic monomer associating HPAM as drag reducing agent

“…Salt‐containing formation water or fracturing flow‐back water should be utilized effectively. Although some literatures have declared that flow‐back water is of low utilization value in some cases, DR in brine is also an aspect that cannot be ignored in order to make full use of flow‐back water and reduce cost of fresh water . Here, 20 L aqueous solution containing 600 g NaCl was adopted as simulate brine, DRA was added into the brine, and friction was measured as mentioned above.…”

A selection methodology of flowback treatment technologies and water reuse in hydraulic fracturing in source rocks – a strategy to reduce the environmental impacts in Colombia

“…These types of treatments are based upon the filtration principle, seeing as the physical remotion of particles by size. Separation might be passive (leaving gravity and/or volumetric flow to do the job), or active (where the energy is used to exert pressure and strength upon the water through the filter or membrane stopping contaminants) (Pierce, Bertrand & Cretiu Vasiliu, 2010). Limitations of this treatment process are mainly linked to the following aspects: membrane manufacturing costs, components linked to the system (spares), continuous contamination of the membrane and the energy requirements to generate the right pressure for the remotion of contaminants.…”

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3D printed porous contactors for enhanced oil droplet coalescence

“…The production of crude oil requires the use of large volumes of water, with approximately 8 barrels of produced water for every barrel of crude oil [1]. Environmental regulations mandate the recovery of the oil from the produced water before the latter can be discharged.…”