Chesapeake tests water treatment
fwbusinesspress.com
BY JOHN-LAURENT TRONCHE
July 27, 2009
 Chesapeake tests water treatment
Natural gas exploration and production companies in the Barnett Shale must consider water usage and disposal, and some operators are turning to work-in-progress technologies to reduce their environmental impact and – they hope – costs.
Devon Energy Corp. was the first company in the Barnett Shale to attempt to mitigate its water use when it teamed up with Fountain Quail Water Management in 2005 to use the latter’s mobile heated distillation units, or NOMADs, for treatment of flowback water, produced during hydraulic fracturing operations.
Now, fellow Oklahoma City operator Chesapeake Energy Corp. will launch its own water treatment program at a 42-acre complex near Gateway Park, between Interstate 30 and State Highway 121. The company’s eventual goal is 100-percent efficiency – whatever contaminated water goes into the treatment system comes out, in its entirety, as clean water vapor. Company officials stress the technology isn’t there yet, but months of testing in partnership with the city of Fort Worth could yield good information and improvement.
Not quite soap and water
Chesapeake Energy and Intevras Technologies LLC, based in Austin, are about one week away from beginning testing on their water treatment facility near the former’s Brentwood drill site. The companies are building a system by which produced water from wells across City Council District 4, on the city’s east side, will be treated and redistributed into the environment, thereby lessening the amount of waste that will eventually be pumped into the ground via saltwater disposal well. (Water that results from the drilling process is contaminated with silicates, chlorides, chemicals and more.)
Chesapeake Energy’s Dave Leopold, operations manager in the Barnett Shale, said the Intevras Evras technology could handle produced water up to about 140,000 total dissolved solids. (Fresh water usually is less than 5,000 TDS.)
“The trucks basically drive in over there, go up on this podium and they unload their water. That water is pumped over to these tanks,” Leopold said, pointing at several large, tan-colored drums to hold the produced water. “The water from these tanks will go through this line ... and is pumped into our pretreatment skid, and in this pretreatment skid the iron is knocked out.”
After iron is removed, the produced water enters the Evras machine, which looks like an overgrown cable car, and goes through a thermodynamic process – heating and cooling – to separate the solids and allow clean water vapor to escape from the top into the air.
For every 3,000 barrels (1 barrel is 42 gallons) entered into the process daily, Chesapeake Energy expects to evaporate about 1,200 barrels – about 40 percent recovery.
“That’s pretty significant when you look at the overall water cycle,” he said.
Each machine costs between $1 million and $1.5 million; Chesapeake Energy has ordered two so far, but has room for up to four at the Brentwood site.
The energy company was attracted to the Intevras machines over others due to their ability to use energy from nearby compressor stations, instead of having to install a separate energy source to provide energy for heat.
“It’s incredibly efficient that way,” Leopold said.
In addition to possible environmental benefits from water recycling and less waste in ground, City Council member Danny Scarth, whose district includes the Brentwood site, said reduced truck traffic is positive.
“I think the biggest benefit is getting trucks off the road. If we can bring water into this site through pipelines, pipelines have proven over the years as the single safest method of transporting anything,” Scarth said. He added even with continued truck traffic there are benefits “because the trucks have a much shorter distance to drive from the subject wells (which) means many thousands of fewer miles to drive.”
Out in the country
In more rural areas of the Barnett Shale, Devon Energy continues to work with Granbury-based Fountain Quail, a subsidiary of Calgary, Alberta, Canada-based Aqua-Pure Ventures Inc., as well as other water treatment-specializing companies, though the economy has taken its toll on how many NOMAD systems are being used and how many sit idle.
“We were at nine, currently we are down to six,” said Jay Ewing, completion and construction supervisor at Devon Energy. He added those six units aren’t running full time due to the production cutback measures Barnett Shale producers have taken to rein in costs and trim a gas surplus.
“We’re working on trying to get a clean brine water and use that for fracing,” he said, rather than clean to pure water. “Ultimately, it reduces the total water needed from other sources, but also it reduces the cost of recycling the water.”
Aqua-Pure Ventures has treated about 14 million barrels of frac water since its debut in the Barnett Shale, said Richard Magnus, the company’s chairman of the board. Recently, the company signed memorandas of understanding with Schlumberger Ltd. and M-I SWACO that could take the Barnett-tested technology into shale plays in Louisiana, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, and even worldwide.
“With our technology,” Magnus said, “I think we’re the final piece in their puzzle to be a professional water services management company.”
Bottom line: How much?
Water treatment technologies are more expensive than simply pumping it underground. Chesapeake Energy’s Leopold said the cost to treat produced water is about $2 per barrel, whereas the cost to dispose is about $0.60 per barrel. Still, he said, those numbers will get closer as the system becomes increasingly efficient.
Companies continue to pitch their technologies to Barnett Shale Water Conservation and Management Committee members (a consortium of operator employees), but some still go home empty-handed. In late 2007 and 2008, Utah-based 212 Resources Corp. shopped its technology around the Barnett Shale, but the environment proved unresponsive.
“The Barnett Shale never really turned out to be a good location for us. There are so many disposal wells around that unless the company was really focused on conservation they just went to the disposal wells. They’re cheap and nearby,” said Robert Waits, executive vice president for business and government affairs. “Also drilling is down substantially.”
North Texas has plenty of cheap water and saltwater injection wells, he said, which makes treatment technology a difficult sell. Each region is unique, however; in the Marcellus Shale, for example, the geology isn’t conducive to disposal wells and local governments hold water treatment to higher standards before reintroduction into the environment, he said.
“We’re talking to some of the same companies in the Barnett Shale for work in Pennsylvania, where drilling is up 60 percent,” he added.
Whether operators in the Barnett Shale and beyond adopt water treatment measures across the board largely could depend on how successful Devon Energy, Chesapeake Energy and others are with their respective programs.
Ultimately, when it comes to adopt treatment or not to adopt, Waits said, “economics do play a part.” |
