American Oil and Gas Reporter - February 2019 - 52

SpecialReport: Unconventional Resource Science

Study Models Treating Brine For Reuse
By Nicholas Siefert,
Madison Wenzlick
and Alexandra Hakala

concentrations of scale-forming cations
and anions. This brine is used as feedstock
in the Gulf Coast petrochemical industry,
including chlor-alkali and fertilizer plants.
In states such as Louisiana and Texas,
10-pound brine historically has been obtained by flooding underground salt caverns, but that practice has been linked to
the creation of sinkholes. Consequently,
converting produced brines into 10-pound
brines can have both economic and environmental incentives.
The National Energy Technology Laboratory's Research and Innovation Center
has designed a concept for a centralized
water treatment facility that is capable of
converting produced water into a salable
10-pound brine product and pure water.
This approach to cost-effective brine treatment and recycling uses commercially
available technology. Steps in the modeled
treatment process include separating
oil/grease and water, removing solids,
removing divalent ions (calcium, magnesium, strontium, etc.) and hardness,
and dewatering to concentrate the brine
into a near-saturation state. The end result
is a clean 10-pound brine for sale and
reuse in chemical industries or in drilling
and completing new wells.
The challenges in treating high-salinity
water for reuse include the necessity for
high-energy techniques, such as mechanical vapor recompression (MVR), and
difficulties and scaling limitations in re-

PITTSBURGH, PA.-Extracting oil and
gas produces a high-salinity brine byproduct, and managing this produced water
constitutes a significant portion of a well's
production costs and operational considerations for oil and gas companies. Statistics
show that the cost of managing flowback
water ranges from 5 to 19 percent of a
well's total capital cost, while the cost of
managing produced water ranges from 7
to 52 percent of a well's total lease operating expenses, depending on location.
As the industry focuses on treating
and reusing produced water for hydraulic
fracturing, enhanced oil recovery and
other applications, and thereby reducing
the volumes injected into disposal wells,
one solution is to convert produced water
that otherwise would be injected for disposal into a valuable brine product and
clean water stream. Specifically, the capacity and capabilities of centralized water
treatment facilities could be enhanced to
convert produced brines into brine products
required by local industries, thereby matching consumers of brine with the oil and
gas companies that produce it.
As an example, dewatering can generate
a commodity called "10-pound brine,"
which is water nearly at saturation with
sodium chloride (NaCl) and with minimal
FIGURE 1

Base Line Process Flow Diagram for Centralized Water Treatment
Input streams
from many wells

NaOH
Water collection
Storage reservoir

1

Oil/Water
separation
2b

NaOH addition

2a

Water

7

Mechanical vapor
recompression
8

6

3

Post-filtration
chemical
processing

pH to neutral

10lb NaCI Brine

52 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

Low pH

4

Oil
HCI

3

5a

Ultrafiltration/
Suspended
solids removal
5b
Sludge cake

Removal of
TSS, Ca2+,
Mg2+, Sr2+

moving divalent ions for reuse. NETL
has developed two models: a base line
model that incorporates chemical precipitation for divalent ion removal to meet
reuse specifications, and an advanced
model that uses nanofiltration membranes
(NF) to remove divalent ions.
In both cases, MVR was modeled for
brine concentration. The base line process
is cost-effective for low-salinity and lowhardness brines, but the chemical precipitation step can become cost-prohibitive
for high-salinity or high-hardness brines.
Fortunately, improvements in treatment
technologies can reduce the cost of brine
management drastically. The research
demonstrates that NF membranes are a
promising alternative to chemical precipitation as a means of separating monovalent and divalent ions, although further
development of the technology is required
for high-salinity and high-hardness brines.
Produced Brines
NETL analyzed the baseline and advanced models using four different produced water streams from two South
Texas oil and gas plays: the Eagle Ford
Shale to create a solution for the water
management needs of unconventional resources, and three different brines (characterized as high-hardness, high-salinity
and low-salinity, respectively) from the
Frio formation. These represent the treatment requirements for formation water
from a conventional formation, where
aging wells often have high water-to-oil
production ratios.
The formations were chosen for their
close proximity to chemical manufacturing
plants and other industries that use 10pound brine. The Eagle Ford produces a
brine with a salinity near the level of seawater (10,900 mg/liter of sodium and
19,318 mg/liter of chloride). Compared
with the Frio, it has higher iron content
and can contain as much or more chlorides,
magnesium and strontium per liter.
In general, the three Frio produced
water cases contain higher levels of total
dissolved solids, sodium, chloride, barium
and calcium. The high-hardness Frio has
4,414 mg/liter of calcium (compared with
1,270 mg/liter of calcium in the Eagle
Ford brine). The high-salinity Frio has
39,788 mg/liter of sodium and 66,321
mg/liter of chloride, while the low-salinity
Frio brine has 12,683 mg/liter of sodium



American Oil and Gas Reporter - February 2019

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