A new water cleaning technology introduced in the oil and gas industry!

An emerging water cleaning technology is used in Midland Texas, to process heavily contaminated water coming up, mixed with oil at oil extraction wells. By the end of August, it is expected that 500,000 gallons of water will be processed per day, providing water clean enough to be used in hydraulic fracturing or fracking for oil and natural gas production. The technology was initially developed at MIT's Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy and proves cheaper than existing procedures. 

As the oil and gas industry tries to reach more and more deep, difficult to reach or even almost depleted deposits, contaminated water amounts, generated in the extracting process, keep increasing, and create the need for an efficient cleaning technology. Traditionally, wastewater is re-injected back in the wells, while industries purchase clean water to use in fracking operations. In Midland plant, belonging to Pioneer Natural Resources, a Texas based oil company, a new technology developed by Gradiant, a spinout company based in Woburn, MA, is revolutionizing water treatment. In the initial stages of treatment, oil, grease residue and solid particles are removed and in the sequel, water is heated and sprayed on a large surface of porous material, saturating air with water vapor. The water saturated air is pumped up through small holes into a group of shallow trays filled with water, where it is condensed with the existing water. Those "bubble columns" greatly facilitate the process of condensing the water vapor, since no metal heat exchangers are required. This carrier gas extraction process recycles nearly 85% of the required heat to operate the system, while the residue and solid particles from the cleaning process are disposed as sludge in landfills. 

Developers of the new technology Anurag Bajpayee, president and CEO of Gradiant, and Prakash Govindan, the company's CTO, initially focus on the booming petroleum and natural gas industry in the United States and recognize that "Water issues have been a point of a lot of controversy for the industry". And how can this be doubted, given that worldwide, each barrel of oil also produces three barrels of highly contaminated water.