A Synergistic Partnership For Beneficial Reuse Of Produced Water

ConocoPhillips and Texas A&M collaborate on research to reuse produced water from oil and gas industries.

Compared to the amount of oil it produces, the Permian Basin, the largest unconventional oil and gas field in the United States, creates two to five times the amount in water, otherwise known as produced water. The Permian Basin’s daily output of produced water is about 1 billion gallons of water and growing — enough to fill over 1,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Thanks to the generosity of ConocoPhillips, Texas A&M University researcher Dr. Shankar Chellam is working to put this produced water to good use.

For over 10 years, Chellam has collaborated with ConocoPhillips on foundational work in industrial water treatment, publishing several peer-reviewed research papers. This research focuses on the purification of produced water to generate clean brine, a high-in-salt solution without iron and solids. Clean brine can be reused internally within oil and gas operations, offsetting demand on freshwater resources.

With new funding from ConocoPhillips, Chellam and engineers from ConocoPhillips will build on their previous work by also exploring how to remove salt from water so it can be used beneficially outside the oil and gas industry. “We've been working to determine how to use this water beyond injecting it back into the ground,” said Chellam, the A.P. & Florence Wiley Professor III in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “We want to actually use it for something; the Permian Basin is already a fresh water-scarce region.”

Potential reuses of further purified produced water include industrial and engineering applications, such as steam generation for process heat, dust control in dry landscapes, irrigating non-food crops, or even as water to make roads.

“As a water treatment engineer, my area of expertise is in different conventional and advanced purification techniques,” said Chellam. “My job for these further applications is called 'fit for purpose' purification. Depending on the intended use, a different level of water purification will be necessary.”

Over the years, Chellam and ConocoPhillips engineers have developed a truly collaborative partnership. Chellam works closely with Dr. Ramesh Sharma and Jonathan Kiesewetter from ConocoPhillips, whose expertise allows them to jointly tackle water problems facing the oil industry, setting the team on the path to usable solutions. They also collaborate on advanced treatment trains for cost-effective produced water treatment and its reuse.