Not many water process engineers available

Even though produced water treatment is occurring for some years, I feel that it is still new or in developing phase for oilfields. Just due to more and more strict environmental regulations every oilfield is trying to do it but many of them are still struggling it. It seems there are not many engineers mainly working on produced water treatment even though it is a big part of oil production process. Some engineers( but not many) are working in oil sands SAGD fields for water treatment.

I feel that generally we do not have many water process engineers for oil and gas industry. I hope my feeling is wrong. I just hope more and more engineers join this topic, discuss about it and contribute to oil and gas water process.

Future water-treated high quality produced water

In order to dispose of or reinject the produced water within the environmental requirements, the oil in the water has to be removed. Many water deoiling equipment and technologies such as skim tank, IGF, CTour, Epcon-CFU, TORR etc are available in the industry now.

For any water deoiling technology, we have to look at the stability of oil-in-water emulsion (reverse emulsion). Water deoiling is to break the emulsion and to separate the oil from water. The emulsion stability may differ dramatically from different oilfields due to different reservoir characteristics, oil compositions, organics or chemicals used in the productions. It may take from a few minutes to a few months or more to separate oil from water for different emulsion. Oil sands SAGD water has very tight emulsion due to high asphaltene content and process chemicals, which bring challenges for SAGD water treatment.

Produced water

Produced water is the water that is produced with the crude oil when the oil production is occurring. The water content in the oil pumped from the wells varies between different reservoirs, but the quantity is huge (may be up to more than 90 per cent). Because of the huge volume of the produced water, produced water treatment is a big issue for oilfields.

Due to more and more strict environmental regulations, the quality of treated produced water is required to be better and better. Solids in the water is easy to be removed. Organic removal is not popularly required yet even though some oilfields are doing it now. The main target is to remove oil. The content of oil in water(OIW) is required to be from 40 ppm to 5 ppm and even less in different countries and areas.