A New Approach to Wastewater Could Vaporize It Right Out of Existence
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Technology
SeaChange Technologies has an idea - vaporizing the wastewater and releasing it into the atmosphere.
Vaporizing wastewater would dramatically reduce the volume of waste that oil producers have to dispose of without the additional costs associated with treating the water and selling it to customers.
One of SeaChange’s pilot-scale units can vaporize more than thirty barrels of water a day, enough to eliminate wastewater disposal needs for hundreds of thousands of stripper wells around the U.S.
Two of these units can fit in a standard 20-foot shipping container, making it easy to scale up vaporization capacity for larger wells and move the vaporization units to other wells, as production dictates. Such a technology could be particularly beneficial for wells in remote locations where trucking costs for wastewater disposal are too expensive for production to continue.
Challenges remain for SeaChange’s technology to be adopted throughout the O&G industry. Vaporizing wastewater still requires significant energy inputs, but a basic thermodynamic calculation indicates that the energy costs could be as low as $1 per barrel of water, putting the cost of vaporization at the low end of the range of costs for wastewater disposal.
Environmentalists will rightly be skeptical of the idea of emitting a cocktail of water vapor, heavy metals, and other pollutants into the atmosphere, but SeaChange contends that their technology meets EPA standards for air pollution.
Image source: Pixabay
Read full article: Texas Monthly
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Taxonomy
- Wastewater Disposal
- Reclaimed Wastewater
- Industrial Wastewater Treatment
- Technology
- Wastewater Treatment
- Wastewater Treatment Plant Design