6 ms·

Removing oil left behind in 2.5B gallons of produced water every day in U.S.

136 points by howard941 8y ago

jMyles 8y ago
The title is a little hard to parse; this paragraph cleared it up for me: > Handling that water is a major challenge in the oil refinery industry, particularly because it is deemed unusable for household and commercial use by the Environmental Protection Agency because of remaining contaminants. Several commercial treatments are available, but they are expensive, do not remove all traces of contaminants from water and can be energy-intensive.
- howard941 8y ago
  Thanks, I fixed up the title
  - baxtr 8y ago
    I still don’t get it... EDIT: the first paragraph in the linked article was very insightful Purdue University researchers have developed a process to remove nearly all traces of oil in produced water.
    - howard941 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produced_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produced_water may help?
      - dmoy 8y ago
        That doesn't help before you open the comments section though.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - jandrese 8y ago
        That seems like an overly flowery term. Why not use "oil well wastewater" that a layman would understand immediately.
  - allknowingfrog 8y ago
    It may be helpful to quote "produced water" as it is a confusing and unfamiliar term for those outside of the industry.
    - jMyles 8y ago
      I think it's fair to say that it's outright misleading - the water is not produced in any reasonable sense of the word.
      - nrgy 8y ago
        I get how it may be misleading, and given that produced water should be in quotes to mark it as an industry term, it is still the only useful term for said water. Within the industry it is very well defined and easily understood. If you use another term like "obtained water" it would be up to interpretation by each individual including industry individuals. It's like contract law, they figured out a while ago that when dealing with technical issues, technical words should be used and taken to have their normal industry meaning, otherwise it breeds more confusion.
brianbreslin 8y ago
I imagine it still isn't household use ready after this since 5% of the contaminants are still there. However if they can reuse for their own internal purposes, that would be great.
- fovc 8y ago
  If they were 20x over the limit, then they're now right at the limit.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  Directly it isn't, but because it now meets the EPA standards for clean water from industrial sources it can be discharged into regular water sources where it dilutes and can be drawn from and further filtered by conventional water works, which helps lesson the impact of it's water usage a lot.
  - hanniabu 8y ago
    This is something I never understood. When everybody is polluting waterways and ground water, it doesn't really get diluted. These companies should be forced to operate responsibly are cease operations. Everyone is for capitalism until we start trying to hold them responsible. If we held them responsible, they'll either adapt or they'll go under and a competitor that is able to operate responsibly will appear.
    - tomatotomato37 8y ago
      It can still dilute if everybody is releasing different pollutants; it's only a problem in clusters of similar industry that overwhelms intake filtering. As to your second argument, the EPA's literal purpose is to force citizens to operate their life/business responsibly; if you think their standards are too lenient than take it up with your elected representative. One of my biggest frustrations I see here are people pushing to overthrowing everything for grand new systems, completely ignore the implementation details for such a system, and then get frustrated when the system fails because of the details. The system to accomplish your goals is already fucking there, use it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
allknowingfrog 8y ago
I appreciate it when smart people solve problems I don't even know about.
metaphor 8y ago
Article didn't link or cite a relevant paper[1]. It's from 2018...anything newer? [1] https://doi.org/10.1115/IMECE2018-86906 https://doi.org/10.1115/IMECE2018-86906
AWildC182 8y ago
This is super weird but just a few days ago Mike Patey (guy behind the draco bushplane [1]) posted a video [2] about his next airplane build and briefly showed a huge evap tower that he described as being for separating water produced in the petroleum industry. Oil water separation doesn't exactly sound like a millennium challenge problem so I wonder if there's some sort of grant competition right now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743960 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9MNWh8kkIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9MNWh8kkIM
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago
  Oil water separation is actually really hard, it's been a huge problem for over a century. There's a lot of research being done on the topic, dozens of teams from top universities around the world working on it; just look through recent issues of Energy & Fuels, for instance. Luckily for the environment, it is one of those cases where "more oil emitted into waterways = less money earned", through less amount of product, or less valuable product - cleaning up the oil and cleaning up the water often go hand in hand.
pjc50 8y ago
Assuming this works and is scalable, it's potentially a game-changer for Saudi Arabia. All wells produce water along with the oil. Great background from the old theoildrum blog: http://theoildrum.com/node/6052 http://theoildrum.com/node/6052 and http://theoildrum.com/node/9045 http://theoildrum.com/node/9045 The "water cut" is the percentage of water in the fluid coming out of the drill hole. Normally this is a disposal problem. If it's drinkable (and not saline!), Saudi no longer need to desalinate quite so much water, they can just use the water from the oil wells.
- yscik 8y ago
  It is highly saline, according to the first article, more so than seawater.
  - jackfoxy 8y ago
    You could say water from the depth of most petroleum reservoirs underground is naturally polluted. It can be more than just saline polluted. Pretty much anything that can be in the earth and can mix with water. There are cases of shallower reservoirs where the petroleum is mixed with otherwise potable water. If it is within an agricultural area, like Bakersfield, it may be treated and used for irrigation. The treatment is mostly just multiple steps of skimming off petroleum.
    - ascar 8y ago
      While I don't necessarily disagree with your first statement, your second statement seems to put things in the wrong light. > It can be more than just saline polluted. Pretty much anything that can be in the earth and can mix with water. Most water we drink is rain filtered through many different layers of earth. It's the cleanest source of freshwater we have. Minerals only mix to a very small percentage with the water during this process and this "pollution" is actually wanted to a certain degree, i.e. mineral water.
      - ianai 8y ago
        Except the earth includes minerals we probably don’t want to drink like asbestos, arsenic, radioactive isotopes, etc. The concentrations are going to vary wildly. Basically I’m sure deep well water and water from the surface will be exposed to vastly different things. I know, as a lifelong desert dweller who's almost exclusively lived off well water, that well water quality needs to be monitored and treated. My alma mater’s town had to stop using one well when arsenic tolerances were decreased, for instance.
iamgopal 8y ago
Isn't DAF and skimmer already solved this ? The article does not goes in to details, but I reckon it's a oliophilic foam material instead of a rope or belt that we usually use, thus increase contact area ? Edit: my bad, this article is about using nanoparticles to increase solar distillation efficiency.
mrtweetyhack 8y ago
Purdue hires 5 year old to write headlines
euroclydon 8y ago
Is this water really being "held"? For how long? It's pretty tough to sequester water on that scale.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
This is a great result, and then we get to this: From the article -- Researchers are working with the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization to patent the innovation, and they are looking for partners to continue developing it. What is the public good of patenting a process that would make usable water more available? Doesn't this graduate student get what they paid for? An advanced degree in chemical engineering from a prestigious school? Doesn't the school get what it wants from this, a reputation for doing solid research into big problems and coming up with good answers? And then they want to take the idea out of considering by applying a 'tax' to it so that the university can extract some rent on work they have already been paid for. I find that so unpalatable.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  What is unpalatable is the extractive industry thinking they can get by on goodwill. Why don't we force mining and oil companies to pay for the externalities of their profit and pollution-generating enterprise, and let that money flow to institutions that do the research to clean it up?
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    I agree with you that we force the mining and oil companies to pay for the externalities of their process. What I disagree with is then adding on an additional cost just to pad the pockets of the University. I would be totally cool if the EPA said, "This works great, all extractive industries creating 'produced water' must use this process to clean up that water to safe water standards." But what Purdue wants is to have these companies to both have to do this, and have to pay Purdue a 'tax' on the process just because one of their graduate students and a professor there thought it up. That 'rent seeking' model takes good ideas an kills them. Digital cash which could have taken off in the 90s was completely killed by patent holders unwilling to license patents for less than extortionate rates. The RSA algorithm, similarly held hostage. Purdue would get much more goodwill if they did not patent the process, and it would be easier for the EPA to mandate it because doing so would not disproportionately benefit a third party economically.

136 points by howard941 8y ago

The title is a little hard to parse; this paragraph cleared it up for me: > Handling that water is a major challenge in the oil refinery industry, particularly because it is deemed unusable for household and commercial use by the Environmental Protection Agency because of remaining contaminants. Several commercial treatments are available, but they are expensive, do not remove all traces of contaminants from water and can be energy-intensive.

howard941 8y ago
Thanks, I fixed up the title
- baxtr 8y ago
  I still don’t get it... EDIT: the first paragraph in the linked article was very insightful Purdue University researchers have developed a process to remove nearly all traces of oil in produced water.
  - howard941 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produced_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produced_water may help?
    - dmoy 8y ago
      That doesn't help before you open the comments section though.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jandrese 8y ago
      That seems like an overly flowery term. Why not use "oil well wastewater" that a layman would understand immediately.
- allknowingfrog 8y ago
  It may be helpful to quote "produced water" as it is a confusing and unfamiliar term for those outside of the industry.
  - jMyles 8y ago
    I think it's fair to say that it's outright misleading - the water is not produced in any reasonable sense of the word.
    - nrgy 8y ago
      I get how it may be misleading, and given that produced water should be in quotes to mark it as an industry term, it is still the only useful term for said water. Within the industry it is very well defined and easily understood. If you use another term like "obtained water" it would be up to interpretation by each individual including industry individuals. It's like contract law, they figured out a while ago that when dealing with technical issues, technical words should be used and taken to have their normal industry meaning, otherwise it breeds more confusion.

brianbreslin 8y ago

I imagine it still isn't household use ready after this since 5% of the contaminants are still there. However if they can reuse for their own internal purposes, that would be great.

fovc 8y ago
If they were 20x over the limit, then they're now right at the limit.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
Directly it isn't, but because it now meets the EPA standards for clean water from industrial sources it can be discharged into regular water sources where it dilutes and can be drawn from and further filtered by conventional water works, which helps lesson the impact of it's water usage a lot.
- hanniabu 8y ago
  This is something I never understood. When everybody is polluting waterways and ground water, it doesn't really get diluted. These companies should be forced to operate responsibly are cease operations. Everyone is for capitalism until we start trying to hold them responsible. If we held them responsible, they'll either adapt or they'll go under and a competitor that is able to operate responsibly will appear.
  - tomatotomato37 8y ago
    It can still dilute if everybody is releasing different pollutants; it's only a problem in clusters of similar industry that overwhelms intake filtering. As to your second argument, the EPA's literal purpose is to force citizens to operate their life/business responsibly; if you think their standards are too lenient than take it up with your elected representative. One of my biggest frustrations I see here are people pushing to overthrowing everything for grand new systems, completely ignore the implementation details for such a system, and then get frustrated when the system fails because of the details. The system to accomplish your goals is already fucking there, use it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

allknowingfrog 8y ago

I appreciate it when smart people solve problems I don't even know about.

metaphor 8y ago

Article didn't link or cite a relevant paper[1]. It's from 2018...anything newer? [1] https://doi.org/10.1115/IMECE2018-86906 https://doi.org/10.1115/IMECE2018-86906

AWildC182 8y ago

This is super weird but just a few days ago Mike Patey (guy behind the draco bushplane [1]) posted a video [2] about his next airplane build and briefly showed a huge evap tower that he described as being for separating water produced in the petroleum industry. Oil water separation doesn't exactly sound like a millennium challenge problem so I wonder if there's some sort of grant competition right now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743960 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9MNWh8kkIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9MNWh8kkIM

semi-extrinsic 8y ago
Oil water separation is actually really hard, it's been a huge problem for over a century. There's a lot of research being done on the topic, dozens of teams from top universities around the world working on it; just look through recent issues of Energy & Fuels, for instance. Luckily for the environment, it is one of those cases where "more oil emitted into waterways = less money earned", through less amount of product, or less valuable product - cleaning up the oil and cleaning up the water often go hand in hand.

pjc50 8y ago

Assuming this works and is scalable, it's potentially a game-changer for Saudi Arabia. All wells produce water along with the oil. Great background from the old theoildrum blog: http://theoildrum.com/node/6052 http://theoildrum.com/node/6052 and http://theoildrum.com/node/9045 http://theoildrum.com/node/9045 The "water cut" is the percentage of water in the fluid coming out of the drill hole. Normally this is a disposal problem. If it's drinkable (and not saline!), Saudi no longer need to desalinate quite so much water, they can just use the water from the oil wells.

yscik 8y ago
It is highly saline, according to the first article, more so than seawater.
- jackfoxy 8y ago
  You could say water from the depth of most petroleum reservoirs underground is naturally polluted. It can be more than just saline polluted. Pretty much anything that can be in the earth and can mix with water. There are cases of shallower reservoirs where the petroleum is mixed with otherwise potable water. If it is within an agricultural area, like Bakersfield, it may be treated and used for irrigation. The treatment is mostly just multiple steps of skimming off petroleum.
  - ascar 8y ago
    While I don't necessarily disagree with your first statement, your second statement seems to put things in the wrong light. > It can be more than just saline polluted. Pretty much anything that can be in the earth and can mix with water. Most water we drink is rain filtered through many different layers of earth. It's the cleanest source of freshwater we have. Minerals only mix to a very small percentage with the water during this process and this "pollution" is actually wanted to a certain degree, i.e. mineral water.
    - ianai 8y ago
      Except the earth includes minerals we probably don’t want to drink like asbestos, arsenic, radioactive isotopes, etc. The concentrations are going to vary wildly. Basically I’m sure deep well water and water from the surface will be exposed to vastly different things. I know, as a lifelong desert dweller who's almost exclusively lived off well water, that well water quality needs to be monitored and treated. My alma mater’s town had to stop using one well when arsenic tolerances were decreased, for instance.

iamgopal 8y ago

Isn't DAF and skimmer already solved this ? The article does not goes in to details, but I reckon it's a oliophilic foam material instead of a rope or belt that we usually use, thus increase contact area ? Edit: my bad, this article is about using nanoparticles to increase solar distillation efficiency.

mrtweetyhack 8y ago

Purdue hires 5 year old to write headlines

euroclydon 8y ago

Is this water really being "held"? For how long? It's pretty tough to sequester water on that scale.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

This is a great result, and then we get to this: From the article -- Researchers are working with the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization to patent the innovation, and they are looking for partners to continue developing it. What is the public good of patenting a process that would make usable water more available? Doesn't this graduate student get what they paid for? An advanced degree in chemical engineering from a prestigious school? Doesn't the school get what it wants from this, a reputation for doing solid research into big problems and coming up with good answers? And then they want to take the idea out of considering by applying a 'tax' to it so that the university can extract some rent on work they have already been paid for. I find that so unpalatable.

omegaworks 8y ago
What is unpalatable is the extractive industry thinking they can get by on goodwill. Why don't we force mining and oil companies to pay for the externalities of their profit and pollution-generating enterprise, and let that money flow to institutions that do the research to clean it up?
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I agree with you that we force the mining and oil companies to pay for the externalities of their process. What I disagree with is then adding on an additional cost just to pad the pockets of the University. I would be totally cool if the EPA said, "This works great, all extractive industries creating 'produced water' must use this process to clean up that water to safe water standards." But what Purdue wants is to have these companies to both have to do this, and have to pay Purdue a 'tax' on the process just because one of their graduate students and a professor there thought it up. That 'rent seeking' model takes good ideas an kills them. Digital cash which could have taken off in the 90s was completely killed by patent holders unwilling to license patents for less than extortionate rates. The RSA algorithm, similarly held hostage. Purdue would get much more goodwill if they did not patent the process, and it would be easier for the EPA to mandate it because doing so would not disproportionately benefit a third party economically.