By Allen Best
November 5, 2010 -- In a region afflicted by water shortages, natural gas and oil drillers commonly have another problem. It’s called produced water.
“In many ways, the oil and gas industry is misnamed,” says Will Fleckenstein, the BP adjunct professor of petroleum at the Colorado School of Mines. “It really should be called the water industry, because for every barrel of oil produced in the United States, you produce nine barrels of water.”
The water is usually salty, laced with hydrocarbons, and generally unfit for irrigating crops, let alone for drinking.
Drilling companies sometimes reinject the water into deep-underground geological strata, but often there isn’t enough room, because the pore space in the tight-sand rocks is so small. A common approach it to haul the water to evaporation ponds.
But like a better mousetrap, drillers are always open to more effective methods of treating and disposing the produced water. One new idea can be found at the 100-acre Red Desert Water Reclamation campus, located 15 miles west of Rawlins, Wyo.
Owners claim the equivalent of a “secret sauce” in this process, branded under the name Clean Runner, but admit that many parts are not new. One element that may be represent an advance is use of a low-voltage electrical current, replacing chemical treatment.
Cate Street Capital, the New Hampshire-based owner technology, hopes to treat 270 million gallons of water annually at the plant.
“It’s a matter of timing, cost and effectiveness. All three have come together with Clean Runner,” says Richard M. Cyr, senior vice president of Cate Street. He said the process costs slightly more than simple evaporation, but with a key advantage: the water can be repurchased cheaply for further hydrofracking in natural gas wells. This eliminates need to purchase clean water from other sources, such as municipalities.
While hydrofracking introduces some contamination, the native water quality from deep underground tends to have high counts of total dissolved solids, or TDS. It’s 3,000 parts per liter in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, 30,000 in North Dakota’s Bakken shale, and as high as 50,000 in other locations.
The new process at the Red Desert facility can clean produced water with TDS of up to 9,000.
Does Clean Runner have sturdy legs? Telling will be whether ExxonMobile, Shell and other large companies embrace it. Doug Hock, a spokesman for Encana, the Canadian company with extensive operations in Colorado, Texas and Wyoming, says solutions are welcomed. “Water treatment is a big issue. It’s really dependent on where you are drilling. Each basin has its own unique challenges.”
At the School of Mines, Fleckenstein sounds skeptical. His department gets approached ever few months about a new water-treatment process. Many processes get tripped up by the impurities in the water, he says. Also, while some processes that work fine in the laboratory struggle in field operations.
But entrepeneurs who can figure out better ways to treat produced water should find an eager market. Geoffrey Thyne, of the University of Wyoming’s Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute. notes that seven or eight processes have been introduced, and they are now sorting themselves out in the marketplace.
Thyne said one problem is legal: in most places, the well drillers don’t actually own the water, and hence they can’t sell it. The specifics of this as it relates to coal-bed methane drilling have been sorted out in a new National Academy of Sciences report, “Management and Effects of Coalbed Methane in the United Stations (2010).”
If these technologies succeed in cleaning up produced water at lower costs, they could provide a substantial source of water for arid parts of the county, such as the stressed Colorado River Basin. Wyoming’s Power River Basin already has 18,000 wells into the coal-bed methane.
Theron John, chairman of James Creek Water Services, a water-treatment manufacturing company based in Brighton, Colo., is credited with coalescing the early technological development after purchaing the idea in 1991. “It’s really going to change the face of the industry,” he predicts.
