Wastewater Treatment Insights
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Moving Towards Effective Management Of Produced Water
8/18/2022
You cannot produce oil without water, because water is present naturally in both onshore and offshore oil reservoirs. This naturally occurring water is called produced water. Produced water has a simple to complex composition that is variable, and it is considered as a mixture of dissolved and particulate organic and inorganic chemicals (Al-Ghouti et al. 2019) with an average of 7 to 10 barrels of produced water being generated for each barrel of oil during the course of an operation (Guerra, Dahm, and Dundorf 2011).
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Early Retrofit Benefits Of Open-Channel UV Wastewater Treatment Systems
8/16/2022
Learn how wastewater treatment plants using UV technology can capitalize on retrofit options and what they can expect from them.
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Produced Water Management: An Overlooked Subject In Academia
8/9/2022
Water is one of the world's most critical natural resources, but too many people take it for granted, raising awareness of its importance — and complexities — is too often left out of public discourse. My recent visit to a few engineering colleges as a STEM ambassador made me realize that many engineering programs are offered today than when I went to school.
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Water Is Money
8/9/2022
"Why isn't water free?" Not surprisingly, that's a common query on Google — common enough that there are some outstanding responses right at the top of the screen when you type it in. After all, water is everywhere. And because it's vital to survival, we see it as a human right, linked to a moral imperative different from any other commodity. Of course, there are significant costs tied with pumping, conveying, metering and, perhaps most importantly, purifying the water we pay for. So, although we tend to undervalue water compared to its importance, we do have to pay something for it. Or, as my friend Steve Bhaerman likes to say, "water is a we-source, not a free-source."
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Sustainable Clarification In Food And Beverage Operations
8/5/2022
Companies within the food & beverage industry generate significant quantities of wastewater each day. For example, a 16 oz. can of beer is about 90-95% water; however, to make that can, beer producers utilize approximately 7 times this quantity. About 2/3 to 3/4 of the water is typically discharged as wastewater to a municipal sewer system.
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Digitalization In The Water Industry: Look How Far We've Come
8/2/2022
Every once in a while, I hear someone saying that digitalization, or going digital, is the next big thing in the water industry. Don't look now, but digitalization is here; and it has been for a few decades.
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To Reduce Harmful Algal Blooms And Dead Zones, The U.S. Needs A National Strategy For Regulating Farm Pollution
7/18/2022
Midsummer is the time for forecasts of the size of this year’s “dead zones” and algal blooms in major lakes and bays. Will the Gulf of Mexico dead zone be the size of New Jersey, or only as big as Connecticut? Will Lake Erie’s bloom blossom to a human health crisis, or just devastate the coastal economy?
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What Role Can Decentralized Water Reuse Play in Tackling Water Scarcity?
7/15/2022
Onsite and localized reuse expand the practice overall, which will be essential for long-term security.
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Using Biotechnology To Restore Productivity Of Anaerobic Digesters
7/15/2022
When the production line of anaerobic digestion is slowed, efficiency is lost, and the reverse is true when holdups are cleared.
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General Considerations For Treating Water For Difficult Pollutants
7/6/2022
As a matter of course, we normally consider removing various pollutants by direct means such as microbial degradation, chemical treatment that results in a change in the pollutant in some way that is to our benefit (usually oxidation/reduction), or in some manner that results in products easily removed such as gases, various precipitants, or even degraded compounds that are no longer toxic. Some methods are entirely physical, such as centrifugation and filtration, even settling; others are semi-hybrid measures, such as exploitation of various adsorption criteria that do not require chemical change.