WaterStrider is a patent-pending multi-staged process to treat water recovered during oil and gas production, especially water from fracking. Frac water contains contaminants such as iron and other metals, suspended solids, dissolved solids, free oil, emulsified petroleum hydrocarbons,dissolved sulphide, microorganisms, pre-treatment chemicals, and proppants. Treatment by waterStrider enables water from fracking to be reused repeatedly by oil and gas producers.
How can waterStrider be successful when others are not?
The business opportunity to treat frac water to a water quality that is suitable for reuse has attracted the attention of other technology developers and oil well service providers. So why will waterStrider be successful when competing ventures have largely failed?
Two Best-in-Class Technologies Working Together: Due to a wide range of contaminant levels, no single technology can affordably treat water from fracking so it can be reused. Entirely different removal mechanisms are needed to remove contaminants such as oils, dissolved metals, sulphide, particulate solids, and microorganisms from water. Consequently, a combination of physical and chemical and/or electrochemical methods is required for this difficult application.
waterStrider can thrive where others have not due to important technical advantages provided by two proprietary best-in-class technologies that enable good quality treated water to be produced at relatively low cost. Described below, waterStrider integrates the patented “MikroForme” and patent pending “gravitEC” technologies into a single process to treat water from fracking.
MikroForme is employed in two distinct steps within waterStrider:
- MikroForme exploits the tendency of contaminants in frac water to foul surfaces. Micro-bubbles help agglomerate and float chemically coagulated and polymer flocculated contaminants, separating them from treated water.
- Ozone and oxygen gas micro-bubbles are transferred into frac water to oxidize contaminants, destroy microbes, and float solids to separate them from treated water. Although ozone is costly to produce, high efficiency use with MikroForme enables its feasibility for waterStrider.
GravitEC serves the following functions in waterStrider:
- gravitEC helps adjust pH to remove precipitated contaminants as well as excess dissolved coagulant from water.
- Dissolved anode coagulates contaminants that are not removed upstream by MikroForme air flotation.
- Oxygen is produced electrochemically to oxidize contaminants and remove them from solution.
- Microbes are destroyed.
Multiple Treatment Steps: Multiple steps of MikroForme air flotation, gravitEC, and then MikroForme ozonation in a single continuous process provide overlapping capabilities to remove contaminants. This is important with ever-changing incoming contaminant levels. Without changing operational settings, when one treatment stage receives a peak concentration of contaminants, downstream treatment stages contribute to their removal.Employing several treatment stages in series is feasible with waterStrider because each stage is mechanically simple and low cost. Thus, the overall treatment process is moderate cost to build and operate.
Benefits of Treating Frac Water for Reuse
Rather than hauling both fresh and produced water significant distances from sources of water supply and to disposal sites, treating water from fracking so it can be reused back in fracking instead of injected into a disposal well can provide a number of economic and environmental benefits:
- Conserve fresh water and provide certainty of water supply for fracking
- Reduce water trucking distances, empty back hauls, truck traffic, road wear, and GHG emissions
- Reduce chemical requirements for fracking
- Eliminate the need for water disposal down injection wells
- Lower costs