Pretreatment Techniques for Produced Water with Subsequent Forward Osmosis Remediation

Abstract

Unconventional oil and gas extraction is on the rise across the United States and comprises an integral component in meeting the nation’s energy needs. The primary by-product of this industrious process is produced water, which is a challenging matrix to remediate because of its complex physical and chemical composition. Forward osmosis is a viable option to treat high-salinity produced water; however, fouling has been an issue. This study aimed to treat produced water before using forward osmosis as a remediation option. Trials consisted of a series of five experiments in order to evaluate the performance of the membrane. Samples were treated by centrifugation, activated carbon, filtration, ferric chloride, as well as coagulants and a polymer. It can be concluded that forward osmosis can be used to extract water from high-salinity oil field brines and produced water, and that pretreating the produced water decreased the tendency for fouling. The pretreatment with the overall best performance was activated carbon, which also yielded the lowest total organic carbon concentrations of 1.9 mg/L. During remediation trials using produced water pretreated with activated carbon as the feed solution, there was a 14% decrease in flux over the course of the 7 h trials. The membrane performance was restored after washing.

Recent Progresses of Forward Osmosis Membranes Formulation and Design for Wastewater Treatment

“…Oily wastewater contamination is a serious matter as the incurred environmental impacts are often negative due to their toxicity to almost all marine creatures. During every operation of drilling and hydraulic fracturing of wells in petrochemical industries, a huge amount of oil and gas wastewater is produced as produced water [108]. The production of produced water which include injection water and solutions of chemical used to intensify crude oil and natural gas production is known as the major sources of oil pollution in the open seas.…”

Optimization of thin film solid phase microextraction and data deconvolution methods for accurate characterization of organic compounds in produced water

“…The approach is meant to completely remove the waste product from the water cycle, a task that is unfortunately not always easy to complete and might have long‐lasting ramifications in the future. More recent efforts have progressed toward the filtering and remediation of this waste, allowing the reintroduction of this water into the industrial cycle [4–8].…”

Forward Osmosis Membrane Technology in Wastewater Treatment

“…Forward osmosis has been utilized to treat various types of wastewater such as municipal wastewater (sewage) [95][96][97][98], oily wastewater [67,99,100], tanner effluent [101], automobile effluents [102], dairy streams [102,103], produced water [104][105][106] besides synthetic wastewater [107,108].…”