New Fracking Tech Cuts Wastewater
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Academic
Researchers fromUniversity of British Columbia's Clean Energy Research Centre Developed a Technology that Reduces the Carbon Footprint and Cuts Water Use for Shale GasExtraction
Under the direction of David Wilkinson, professor and Canada research chair, chemical and biological engineering, the group has developed a technology that reduces the carbon footprint and cuts water use for shale gas
extraction.
Alfred Lam, a key advisor on the research group, said that's where they see biggest potential.
The group doesn't expect to have the technology ready to be commercialized for at least five years.
Wilkinson started the group in 2004. Lam was his first PhD student. Also involved in the project are Saad Dara, PhD candidate, and Arman Bonakarpour. The research is being done in collaboration with Simon Fraser University professor Steven Holdcroft.
The CCEMC seed funding will be used to prove the performance as well as the economics. The second phase, which is also in line with the CCEMC grant, is to ramp up the process to a scale equal to 10 barrels of waste water per day. Following that, they will get up to about 1,000 barrels per day before commercialization takes place.
The CCEMC grant will fund the project for the next two years.
Beyond that, it could take
another two years for scale up and demonstration.
The technology itself is an advanced electrodialysis system, Lam explained. It works like this: On the front end it takes high salinity water and carbon dioxide and on the back end produces oil field chemicals like hydrochloric acid and carbonated salts, chemicals that are typically used as part of the fracture fluid in shale gas and tight oil extraction.
The process also produces desalinated water, which can be reused for front end
extraction.
Read More Related Content On This Topic - Click Here
Media
Taxonomy
- Sludge Separation
- Fracking
- Water Utility