Beneficial Use
The Key to Sustainable Exploration and Production (E&P)
We need energy and water.
Often these two global needs, to tap into resources for energy and for naturally produced water, have been in conflict. And traditional methods, such as reverse osmosis (RO), storage ponds with spraying, and injection wells to conserve our water supply, have numerous drawbacks including not meeting the reality of field operational demands or the growing need to recover fresh water from produced water.
Additionally, these traditional methods either work well or not at all, or they involve prohibitively high transportation costs that increase air pollution. But that’s where we come in; 212 Resources has the treatment process solution that enables natural gas drilling and production to be cost effective while protecting, even enhancing, our water supply.
We believe we can have both.
The conversion from high TSD waters to clean, distilled water for beneficial use (whether in drilling or to discharge) is the best means the natural gas industry has to maintain its desired level of drilling activity. The recovery of condensate and methanol simply adds to the economic advantage of “full recovery”. That way, we get the energy from oil that we need and the produced water for beneficial use. But it’s been a long road to this realization.
From the early days of the resource conservation and recovery act, ISO programs, zero-discharge operations, responsible production and the evolution of environmental management, the beneficial use of recoverable materials has represented the pinnacle of success. Still, while the natural gas industry has used a wide variety of means available to it for water management, these approaches have focused on injection well disposal or atmospheric evaporation with little more result than the movement and storage of produced or flowback water.
From time to time a vast sum of money is spent on Reverse Osmosis (RO) to manage Total Dissolved Solids (TDS). This traditional process has not worked well in the field because of the presence of oil, constantly changing high levels of TDS yield large volumes of residual concentrate. Produced water is much more complex than “saltwater”, particularly because of the natural hydrocarbon content and other chemicals added in the drilling process. But with experience and a system that recovers waste for beneficial use, full recovery is now available.
