Produced Water Desalination via Pervaporative Distillation

Abstract

Herein, we report on the performance of a hybrid organic-ceramic hydrophilic pervaporation membrane applied in a vacuum membrane distillation operating mode to desalinate laboratory prepared saline waters and a hypersaline water modeled after a real oil and gas produced water. The rational for performing “pervaporative distillation” is that highly contaminated waters like produced water, reverse osmosis concentrates and industrial have high potential to foul and scale membranes, and for traditional porous membrane distillation membranes they can suffer pore-wetting and complete salt passage. In most of these processes, the hard to treat feed water is commonly softened and filtered prior to a desalination process. This study evaluates pervaporative distillation performance treating: (1) NaCl solutions from 10 to 240 g/L at crossflow Reynolds numbers from 300 to 4800 and feed-temperatures from 60 to 85 °C and (2) a real produced water composition chemically softened to reduce its high-scale forming mineral content. The pervaporative distillation process proved highly-effective at desalting all feed streams, consistently delivering <10 mg/L of dissolved solids in product water under all operating condition tested with reasonably high permeate fluxes (up to 23 LMH) at optimized operating conditions.

Navigating Produced Water Sustainability in the Oil and Gas Sector: A Critical Review of Reuse Challenges, Treatment Technologies, and Prospects Ahead

“…Furthermore, the skim tank is also a general apparatus for oil-water separation and depends on gravity. A suitable upgrade to the classical gravity separation system has also been developed [157]. Forero et al [158] mounted an additional structure to the gun barrel separation tanks and attained better dehydration degrees.…”

Modern Use of Water Produced by Purification of Municipal Wastewater: A Case Study

“…It seems reasonable to predict that such membranes could be available for full-scale application in the short-medium term [23]. When applied to seawater desalination, a different but not ready applicable way is to use new separation technologies characterized by better performance and economic feasibility [20,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31].…”