Loading...
Comprehensive evaluation of advanced water treatment processes for the treatment and desalination of produced water
Van Houghton, Brett D.
Van Houghton, Brett D.
Citations
Altmetric:
Advisor
Editor
Date
Date Issued
2023
Date Submitted
Collections
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Embargo Expires
Abstract
With increasing population, industrial development, and global temperatures, water scarcity is the
biggest challenge the world is facing today. As a result, the importance of the research, development, and
implementation of advanced water treatment processes to treat waste streams previously considered too
difficult and expensive for beneficial reuse has never been higher, with an emphasis on waste streams
affecting the water-food-energy nexus. One such waste stream is the wastewater generated from
unconventional oil and gas operations, particularly waste from hydraulic fracturing (HF). This water,
termed produced water (PW), is currently being managed mostly through disposal by deep-well injection
as this is the least expensive way to deal with PW. Therefore, it is critical to develop treatment processes
that are effective in removing contaminants while reducing treatment costs closer to the costs of disposal.
Biological wastewater treatment of conventional waste streams (i.e., municipal wastewater) is an
effective pretreatment strategy for the removal of organic compounds before membrane desalination (e.g.,
reverse-osmosis (RO)) to mitigate biofouling. Unfortunately, PW can limit biological pretreatment and
desalination options due to the high concentrations of total dissolved solids (TDS) which can devastate a
microbial community and eliminate the effectiveness of RO when TDS concentrations exceed 50 g/LTDS
(a common occurrence with PW with TDS ranging from 10 g/L to 250 g/L). A more thorough
understanding of how these processes perform when treating PW, through the use of pilot-scale
experiments and data collection, is therefore necessary to fill this knowledge gap.
Thus, the objective of this dissertation was to evaluate the efficacy and environmental impact of a
cost-effective treatment trains for high salinity PW. This was be accomplished through long-term pilotscale
testing on the effectiveness and resiliency of a biological pretreatment process on high salinity PW,
a membrane bioreactor (MBR). Additionally, this dissertation describes a comprehensive environmental
water quality analysis of PW chemistry, including toxic effects on human cells, throughout a complete
treatment train that includes MBR pretreatment and membrane distillation for desalination. Finally, this
dissertation evaluated the performance and practicality of a novel desalination process, LSRRO, to
desalinate high salinity PW after several pretreatment steps, including MBR.
Associated Publications
Rights
Copyright of the original work is retained by the author.