Efficient Low Maintenance Natural Ceramic Technology to Treat Sea and Produced Water

Abstract

The objective of this work is to treat seawater and produced water by utilizing natural ceramic materials for different applications such as water injection, water disposal, hydraulic fracturing and steam generation. Research has discovered efficient low maintenance natural ceramic materials with unique properties like having a long life of 10 years and very low maintenance — once every 2 years. This paper presents several successful water treatments from different reservoirs with consistence in treatment percentage in all the reservoirs. Natural ceramic earth materials are used to treat seawater and produced water as these materials break down the compositions of the contaminations by adsorption. The lab setup and experimental work has demonstrated the efficiency of this technology by treating several samples. The principle is using treatment stages that the water will pass through. These stages have natural ceramic materials and when they interact with water, it break downs contaminates of produced water such as hydrogen sulfide (H2S), radioactive, sulfate, dissolved solids and depressed oil in water. There are several issues associated with produced water such as H2S contaminations, including safety, formation damage, scaling and corrosion. That increases the operational cost and workover, increases downtime, and killing and coiled tubing intervention. The water treatment eliminates or reduces surface facility costs. The system treated different contaminations such as radioactive (79%), sulfate (89%), chloride (80%) total dissolved solids (TDS) (80%), and others. The success of the treatment is due to the unique ceramic materials' properties, which make them an excellent candidate for treatment, such as 80% continuity, a large surface area, adsorptivity and adsorption rate, heat resistance up to 1100 °C, chemically stable (will not react with acid and alkaline), lightweight (sp 0.4 to 0.45), 10 years life time and 2 years maintenance. Based on the result, the current plan is to treat 190,000 barrels per day (BPD).