Digital Trends: PRODUCED WATER AS A HYDRIC RESOURCE

TLBS Corporation has integrated the environmental and sustainable development trend since 2019 with the launch of the "Green Planet Oil & Gas" (GPOG) project. This project consists of creating service lines for the oil industry that will help prevent environmental accidents and preserve the balance. It develops its business management system (BMS) controlled through software called "Essential-ITS." This system offers integral and technological solutions, which allow processing data for follow-up, development, and control utilizing computational models handled from mobile devices through specific applications and real-time distance monitoring to achieve a global positioning, tracking of fugitive gas, and risks in facilities that operate with water, gas, and oil.

Based on the issues associated with hydraulic fracturing and the production projection foreseen for the next ten years in the United States of America, we are currently developing integrated solutions with the application of state-of-the-art technologies to reduce the use of water from both surface and ground bodies of water in hydraulic fracturing and water produced in conventional and non-conventional deposits, through the industrial division service line of TLBS CORPORATION. One of the main objectives is to compress the overexploitation of aquifers. Another concern we must pay special attention to is the number of chemical compounds incorporated into the water flow used for the hydraulic fractioning process. They have a significant impact on bodies of water and complement compliance with environmental regulations for effective final disposal and reuse. At TLBS Corporation, from its Projects and Engineering Department and a multidisciplinary team of experts with high competence in this area, we are developing Projects for Produced Water Treatment Plants of the low, medium, and high processing capacity, creating conceptual, primary, and detailed engineering. We have experience in the construction processes to reduce and control the final disposal of water produced from conventional and non-conventional wells.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states on EPA-600-R-16-236ES Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts of the Hydraulic Fracture Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources in the United States, Dec 2016 that produced water may contain many constituents, depending on the composition of the injected hydraulic fracturing fluid and the hydraulically fractured rock type. Knowledge of the chemical composition of produced water comes from sample collection and analysis, which often requires advanced laboratory equipment and techniques to detect and quantify chemicals in this water. In general, produced water contains:

• Salts, including those composed of chloride, bromide, sulfate, sodium, magnesium and calcium.
• Metals, including barium, manganese, iron and strontium.
• Organic compounds of natural origin, including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes (BTEX), oil and grease.
• Radioactive materials, including radium.
• Hydraulic fracture chemicals and their chemical transformation products.

The engineering team works from the confluence of nanotechnology and biotechnology in a single system that can provide the results of inspection and sanitation of facilities through the information captured from the operational activity, and this will evaluate facilities, processes, and equipment that are related to the movement of hydrocarbon production (including consequence). Consequently, preventive and corrective action plans are created in response to the environmental impact generated by such activities to reduce water sources’ contamination.

Tahzi Cath describes an example of a hybrid biological and membrane treatment process with applications for industrial wastewater and drinking water. It focuses on physical, chemical, and biological processes, including filtration, coagulation, adsorption, disinfection, biologically active filtration, and membrane sequencing batch bioreactor processes along with ultrafiltration and nanofiltration.

On the other hand, Professor Rick McCurdy explains that the economy, energy demand, and waste/product generation are related to current treatment technologies. To treat produced water with drinking water quality, currently, there are three main processes, he said:

• Reverse Osmosis (RO, once above 50,000 milligrams of total dissolved solids [TDS] per liter, RO becomes economically inefficient).
• Vacuum distillation/mechanical vapor compression.
• Crystallization to achieve drinking water quality from the produced water.

Based on these possible solutions to the problems shown throughout this article that lead to the practice of Fracking and as mentioned above, the oil and gas production planned for the next ten years in the United States of America may bring negative environmental impact.

TLBS Corporation is currently developing the basis with the application of cutting-edge technologies to reuse congenital water in hydraulic fracturing through the service line in the injection of new wells after a process of filtering technology to control the 1084 chemical components, which according to Chemical Abstracts Service Record (CASRN), could be present in connate water from hydraulic fracturing. In this way, we address two (2) significant problems resulting from this unconventional gas and oil operation. It is the generation of a large volume of these waters and physical-chemical and biological treatments that could set a new trend in the temporary and final disposal.

In compliance with the above, many spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids and chemical additives were caused mainly by technical failures, equipment, and human error. We offer the complement of artificial and cloud technology to control processes from high-end software systems (CMMS) to prevent and reduce failures, environmental disasters, and non-productive time. Similarly, substantially mitigate environmental damage due to the immediate response, coupled with this remote control up to 80%, and reduce maintenance costs by 50%. The engineering applied to this integral solution proposed by TLBS Corporation starts from the most recent biotechnology and nanotechnology advances. To date, we have allowed it to select the methods of Reverse Osmosis, Vacuum Distillation/Mechanical Vapor Compression, and Crystallization to achieve the quality of freshwater from produced water. The technology (Silver Shield) developed by NASA is also being studied to evaluate the project’s costs and feasibility as part of the contribution to environmental damage.

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