Chemical Coagulation Process Cuts Water Costs for Hydrofracking

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Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Eli Gruber says he doesn't want Oil & Gas Producers to treat fresh water like garbage. To try to prevent that, he founded Ecologix Environmental Systems LLC (Alpharetta, Georgia) 11 years ago. And while his firm has an impressive list of Fortune 500 clients, including prominent members of the food, automotive and chemical industries, Gruber wants to do more business in the Oil Patch.

"It can take 60,000 to 100,000 barrels of water to hydraulically fracture one well," Gruber, president and chief executive at Ecologix, told about attendees at this week's Third Annual Niobrara Infrastructure Development Summit, produced by Information Forecast Incorporated (Infocast) (Woodland Hills, California). "Most of that water used in hydro-fracking is fresh water. It is used one time, treated, and then disposed. About 90% of the water ends up in disposal wells. In many ways, water is treated like garbage. The oil industry prefers to use fresh water for hydro-fracking, simply because it is cheap and clean."

But doing business that way requires a small army of trucks to carry the fresh water to the drilling site, and a smaller army of trucks to transport treated water from the well site to a disposal site. Transportation is a major component of water costs for hydraulic fracturing. Beyond dollars and cents, this high volume of truck traffic creates other costs: damaged roads, vehicular accidents, road dust, noise and community resistance. For more on this issue, see March 20, 2013, article - Water, Trucking are Critical Issues for Oil & Gas Development in Colorado's Niobrara Formation.

The Ecologix CEO cited a survey of industry experts that said 72% of those surveyed said water and wastewater was their top concern relating to hydro-fracking. "It seems like solving this issue is a good place to start," he said with some understatement.

Gruber's company has a wastewater treatment system that could save operators up to $100,000 per well, as well as the legal and public relations headaches triggered by trucking water to and from a well site. The technology also could dramatically reduce the need for disposal wells.

"For decades, the oil & gas industry has treated flowback water and produced water from hydraulic fracturing to remove total dissolved solids (TDS), mainly salts," Gruber told conference attendees. The thinking has been that a high level of TDS made the water unfit for reuse in the well, so the water was treated to remove salts and then disposed of in waste disposal wells. But Gruber pointed to new research that showed removal of total suspended solids (TSS), not TDS, was the critical factor in reusing treated frac water: "The removal of TSS, not TDS, is the key factor that enables the use of any briny water--including treated, produced water--for fracking purposes," he said in a white paper distributed at the conference.

"Environmental opposition to the practice of withdrawing fresh water from aquifers, rivers and lakes can be averted by repurposing the water that's already in our possession," the white paper said. "Frac water must be reused. The scientific evidence that produced water can be reused repeatedly through a long series of wells is a beacon of hope. TSS removal is the key to frac water reuse."

In a post-conference interview with Industrial Info, Gruber said the technology his company uses--chemical coagulation--has been around for nearly a century. It is widely used in the food-processing industry to remove oils, fats, grease and suspended solids from the wastewater stream so the water can be reused. In the chemical coagulation process, unwanted elements are separated from the water and float to the surface, where they can be skimmed off. Ecologix's food-processing industry clients included the Kellogg Company (NYSE:K) (Battle Creek, Michigan), Tyson Foods Incorporated (NYSE:TSN) (Springdale, Arkansas) and King's Hawaiian Bakery West Incorporated (Torrance, California).

"We're very keen to see this technology be more widely used in the oil & gas industry," Gruber told Industrial Info. "Salt is a diversion in treating wastewater--suspended solids are the issue."

Another benefit of Ecologix's technology is that it prevents clay swelling, which occurs when clay interacts with fresh water. Clay swelling can reduce a well's productivity by 4% to 40%, he told the Infocast conference. As the water salinity in a well increases, the potential for clay swelling decreases, he said.

Ecologix's technology has been used by oil & gas companies in Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana, and the newest version of the company's equipment will be deployed in wells in Alberta, Canada, and Texas in the coming weeks, he said. Outside the oil & gas industry, Ecologix's technology is used by The Dow Chemical Company (NYSE:DOW) (Midland, Michigan) and Toyota Motor Corporation (NYSE:TM) (Toyota City, Japan), among other Blue Chip companies.

A competing wastewater-treatment technology, electro-coagulation, uses electricity to separate wastes from water, Gruber said. That process causes wastes fall to the bottom of the treatment tank, and removing them takes several additional steps, which significantly increase the size of an operator's water-treatment operations. "Chemical coagulation reduces the water-treatment footprint substantially, by as much as 80% to 90%, because you don't need all the additional tanks to remove the wastes."

Gruber said chemical coagulation cannot be customized to reflect local conditions, but chemical coagulation can. "The challenge facing oil & gas companies is that each well, and thus the composition of each wastewater stream, is different," he said. "Because our process is chemical, we can customize the coagulation process around the unique properties in a wastewater stream." So what works in the Haynesville or Eagle Ford shale could also work in the Bakken or Marcellus shales, he added: "It's just a matter of getting the chemistry right."

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