Pretreatment of Produced Waters Containing High Total Dissolved Solids

There are mainly two types of solids in the oil field waters; Suspended Solids (SS) and Total Dissolved Solids (TDS). While it is easy to remove SS from water, removal of TDS requires the application of advance filtration techniques such as reverse osmosis or ultra-filtration. Because these techniques cannot handle high volumes of the oilfield waters with high TDS content, produced waters originated from hydraulic fracturing activities cannot be treated by using these advance technologies. Thus, in this study we concentrated on the pretreatment of these waters. We investigated the feasibility of the Coagulation, Flocculation, and Sedimentation (CFS) process as pretreatment method to reduce mainly SS in Produced Water (PW) samples. We collected samples from 14 different wells in the Permian Basin. First, we characterized the water samples in terms of pH, SS, TDS, Zeta potential (ZP), Turbidity, Organic matter presence and different Ion concentration. We tested varying doses of several organic and inorganic chemicals, and on treated water samples we measured pH, TDS, SS, Turbidity, ZP and Ions. Then, we compared obtained results with the initial PW characterizations to determine the best performing chemicals and their optimal dosage (OD) to remove contaminants effectively. The cation and anion analyses on the initial water samples showed that TDS is mainly caused by the dissolved sodium and chlorine ions. ZP results indicated that SS are mainly negatively charged particles with absolute values around 20 mV on average. Among the tested coagulants, the best SS reduction was achieved through the addition of ferric sulfate, which helped to reduce the SS around 86%. To further lessen SS, we tested several organic flocculants in which the reduction was improved slightly more. We concluded while high TDS in the Permian basin does not implement a substantial risk for the reduction of fracture conductivity, SS is posing a high risk. Our study showed, depending on components of the initial PW, reuse of the pretreated water for fracturing may minimize fracture conductivity damage.