| Project Detail |
Waste water management is challenging for many municipal and industrial sectors. The oil and gas industry produces a massive amount of water from underground reservoirs through its wells. Approximately 9 barrels of water is produced for every barrel of oil, and it is typically contaminated with a variety of minerals, heavy metals, and organic compounds. Treating this wastewater is extremely important, due to its health and environmental impacts and abundance, but also technologically problematic due to its many impurities. Conventional water treatment technologies are insufficient to treat fracking wastewater because of the extremely high percentage and numerous types of contaminants, or because the cost or energy requirement is excessive. At the same time, the agricultural sector is a primary consumer of increasingly scarce freshwater, accounting for 63% of U.S. surface water withdrawals, according to the USGS.
Project Innovation + Advantages:
Oregon State University (OSU) is developing a system for extracting clean irrigation water from hydraulic fracturing wastewater using low-grade solar or industrial waste heat. The system would efficiently separate, condense, and reclaim water vapor from wastewater using a heat-activated swirling nozzle combined with an in-line demister. OSU’s technology would be modular, portable, scalable, and deployable at a fraction of the cost of existing treatment systems. If successful, the treated water would be suitable for agricultural use, providing an abundant new water source and easing competition for this vital resource.
Potential Impact:
OSU’s system will demonstrate a module that can produce 25 kilograms per hour of irrigation water from saturated fracking wastewater. |
