GE has made a major commitment for the reclamation of fresh water from contaminated oilfield water in the oil & gas arena. The company has 130 water reclamation units utilizing its Patented Thermal Evaporation Technology in use worldwide for as long as 30 years. Since 2002, GE has spent $4+ billion to buy companies and/or their technologies that can clean water, either through manufacturing equipment or chemistry.
STW has identified GE as the company that has the complete technology, equipment and knowledge of water reclamation package available.
Current Technologies:
ZeeWeed MBR or Membrane Bioreactor – This unit will act as a pretreatment to remove all of the organics in the water such as fracture additives. This is critical to the Brine Concentrator or RO technologies efficiency and longevity.
RO or Reverse Osmosis – This technology can process water up to about 33,000 total dissolved solids into fresh water with approximately 45~70% recovery. The other 30~55% is a more concentrated brine and must be disposed of. The unit is a membrane that actually partitions or separates the water and the dissolved salts yielding the fresh water and concentrated brine. The unit cannot handle high levels of the large ions such as barium, strontium, bromine, and sulfate. These ions actually poison or create permanent damage to the membranes. These units can be truck mounted up to about 200 gpm with high pressure pumps in the skid.
EDRO or Electro-Dialysis Reverse Osmosis – This unit is very similar to the RO but has an electrical grid added to the process. This increases the reclaimable water quality to about 40,000 mg/l with the limit still existing on the barium, strontium, bromine, and sulfate ions.
Brine Concentrator – This will be STW’s primary operational unit to reclaim water. The unit can handle 100,000+ TDS water and reclaim in the 50 to 90% of the inlet water volume as distilled water with less than 5 TDS levels. The percent recovery is tied to the inlet water quality. This unit can process from 100 to 2000 gpm, but STW Resources has chosen to stay in the 500 gpm or smaller sizes since they are somewhat modular and can be moved to alternate locations. The market will require multiple units and locations to process and recover the volumes of water being disposed of now in locations like the Barnett Shale.
ZLD Crystallizer – This is a Zero Liquid Discharge system and can process very high total dissolved solid brines into distilled water and a “salt cake by-product.” The cost of recovering this water is considerably more expensive to utilize. For example a 300,000 TDS brine only contains 70% water and to distill this away from the dissolved solids demands higher energy and then the solids material has to be disposed of or used for road salt applications or other uses.