Produced water treatment solids

With the smallest heating boilers or low volume/low pressure steam producers, water treatment service companies tend to promote easy-to-understand programs, typically based on only one or two multiple-component, blended chemical products (multiblends or one-drum treatments), or increasingly, the novel crystalline solid concentrates (solid water treatment). These customers often have only very limited, water-related, in-house technical skills, and multiblend product programs will seem attractive because they are relatively easy to apply. However, the blending process makes it notoriously difficult to control individual component reserves in the boiler and generally adds considerably to the overall program costs. 

Induced Gas Flotation. Mechanically induced gas dotation (IGF) is employed extensively to remove suspended solids, oil, and other organic matter from oil-field and refinery wastewaters. Consequently, these IGF units are particularly suited to the treatment of oil-in-water or reverse emulsions. Such units generally follow gravity oil-water separation units such as FWKOs, gun barrels, and skim tanks in oil-field-produced water-treatment schemes, and also handle the oily water streams generated from all treaters in a specific produced-fiuid treatment plant. 

Injection of produced water is not a new idea, but the technique has met resistance due to concerns about reservoir impairment (solids or oil in the water may block the reservoir pores and reducing permeability). However, as a field produces at increasingly high water cuts, the potential savings through reduced treatment costs compared with the consequences of impairment become more attractive. 

Sludge or solid waste is unavoidably produced in the treatment of water containing suspended solids. There are, however different technologies that we can select among that will indeed concentrate these solids, and thereby reduce the volumes that we ultimately must dispose of. In addition, some sludge can be stabilized and treated, which can impart a low, but none-the-less marketable value to this waste. These technologies and practices do indeed constitute pollution prevention and waste minimization programs within water treatment plant operations, and they can... 

Wastewater streams from the utility functions include boiler and cooling tower blowdowns and waste brine and sludge produced by demineralizing and other water treatment systems. The quantity and quality of the wastewater streams depend on the design of the systems and the water source. These streams usually contain high dissolved and suspended solids concentrations and treatment chemicals from the boiler and cooling tower. The blowdown streams also have elevated temperatures. 

The treatment of produced water is also necessary because any of the solid contaminants, in conjunction with free floatable oil or emulsions, act as plugging agents at the wellbore. This drastically reduces the injectivity of the well, no matter how often the well is acidized... 

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