What Is Next For Frac Water Treatment

The management of Frac water from development of Marcellus shale wells has been subject to increasing scrutiny. The deeper Utica shale formation is as promising as the Marcellus formation, and will probably have similar management issues. Concerns about frac water include:

• Nature of constituents added for fracing
• Salinity of the frac water and impact of uncontrolled disposal on local waterways
• Concerns about radioactivity still exist (but may be moot)

The initial flowback becomes increasingly saline over time, and the produced water generated over the long term is a heavy brine. Produced water salt content can exceed that of Dead Sea brine.

Management of flow back and produced water has progressed from direct discharge, or dilution and discharge via sewage treatment plants. Current practices involve:

• Various treatment methods to remove barium and other metals
• Evaporation to reduce volume
• Recipes for frac water that allow use of increasingly saline solutions
• Disclosure of frac water formulations used by the drillers and service providers
• Moving around produced water enough to avoid regulation as a residual waste and landfilling the residual sludge

Only one facility has taken the next step to produce salt. See Venture Vision newsletter of Winter/Spring 2010.

Eventually the frac water inventorying and shell game will stop. But when? The economy is tepid at best, gas prices are below $5/mmBtu, regulatory pressure is relatively weak, and mobile evaporation plants are seeing increasing use. Under these conditions, it is unlikely to find a customer willing to commit to a long term take or pay contract, which would be important to securing funding for building a processing plant.

With those qualifications, what will frac water treatment look like in three years? This is what we see in the crystal ball:

• The capacity of some plants will be governed by trucking distances and mobile treatment facilities will see use to reduce transportation costs.

 

• Water lines are now being laid in tandem with new gas gathering lines to pump frac water to central locations for processing.

 

• Mobile evaporation plants will generate heavy brine at the wellhead, which will then require treatment. Centralized facilities that go beyond evaporation will have to be designed based on a nearly saturated feed solution.

 

• The packaged solutions promoted today emphasize a lot of metals removal at the front end — barium, strontium, radium, calcium, magnesium, aluminum and iron. That may prove to be the best solution. But there is an argument for taking barium out at the front end and removing the balance after crystallization, or removing halite (sodium chloride) and selling a concentrated blend of sodium, calcium and magnesium salts as an anti-freeze for coal piles, spraying on roads, or other applications, and reducing the volume of sludge generated in pre-treatment.

 

• Increasing reuse of frac water will yield increasingly saline water. Future design of a stationary facility should be based on a feedstock comparable to high salinity produced water.

 

• Screening of water received for radiation and total dissolved solids. If processors aren’t screening for radiation now they will be. If processors aren’t charging based on both dissolved solids and volume, they will be, as higher salinity water is harder to process.

 

• Front-end segregation of strong and dilute streams, with blending to provide a uniform feed to downstream processes.

 

• Digestion processes in the inventory to remove high concentrations of organic compounds added for fracing.

 

• Crystallization — the produced water shell game will eventually have to stop. Crystallization will be the way out. Some of the producers will attempt homegrown solutions, but the winners will bite the bullet, pay more up front, and reap the benefits of the learning curve that has already been scaled by suppliers of packaged technologies with experience. Anyone who has done it knows that crystallization is hard work, that there are many ways to do it poorly, and only a few ways to do it right.

Obstacles to developing a long term solution include:

• The WV DOH chose to exclude brine produced from the Marcellus formation for use on their highways. This type of action interferes with the development of beneficial use alternatives.
• Producers have little appetite for a costly or complex solution, which may marginalize their participation.
• Reluctance on the part of developers or mobile evaporators to enter into take or pay agreements that would allow service providers to obtain funding to capitalize a good solution.

Ultimately, it will probably take some crisis to trigger an appropriate level of investment:

• Federal intervention
• Dike failure
• A fish kill similar to the Dunkard Creek incident in September 2009 (which was ultimately attributed to sources other than Marcellus related activity)
• Contamination of a community water supply

The regulatory foot dragging will continue, until something makes the situation too embarrassing to ignore, and the regulators get budgets to match the scale of the problem. But there has been some movement.

In 2008, Pennsylvania DEP circulated a letter to Publicly Owned Treatment Works advising them to accept only one percent or less of daily inflow from oil and gas drilling operations, effectively ending a source of free money to various municipalities. The introduction of the FRAC Act — Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act, amending the Safe Drinking Water Act, proposed on June 9, 2009 was another step in the direction of more regulatory oversight. This measure would have repealed a Bush administration exemption provided for the oil and gas industry and would have required disclosure of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing.

Currently the oil and gas industry is the only industry exempt from compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act. Although the FRAC Act and the problems it proposed to address were eclipsed by the Deepwater Horizon incident in the gulf, the movement towards more candor and more oversight will gain traction.

Meanwhile, the waiting game continues, with all steps being tentative. Once the regulatory pressures and financial commitments are in place, the first to market will be popping champagne bottles. Success will find those with good business sense who remember the Roman philosopher Seneca’s maxim: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Don Olmstead has 30 years of engineering experience, working in equipment fabrication, environmental consulting, design and construction. He holds a Bachelor engineering degree from the University of Guelph, Ontario, and a Masters degree from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He can be reached at (412) 231-5890 x 302, or at dolmstead@ventureengr.com.