A Feasibility Study on Shale Gas Plant Water Treatment by Direct Contact Membrane Distillation

Non-conventional oil resources such as shale gas are becoming increasingly important and have drawn the attention of several major oil companies all over the world. Nevertheless, the market-changing growth of shale gas production in recent years has resulted in the emergence of environmental and water management challenges. This is because the water used in the hydraulic fracturing process contains large amount of pollutants including ions, organics, and particles. Accordingly, the treatment of this flowback water from shale gas plant is regarded as one of the key technologies. In this study, we examined the feasibility of membrane distillation as a treatment technology for the water from shale gas plants. Direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) is a thermally-driven process based on a vaper pressure gradient across a hydrophobic membrane, allowing the treatment of feed waters containing high concentration of ions. Experiments were carried out put in the lab-scale under various conditions such as membrane types, temperature difference, flow rate and so on. Synthetic feed water was prepared and used based on the data from literature. The results indicated that DCMD is suitable for treating not only low-range flowback water but also high-range flowback water. Based on the theoretical calculation, DCMD could have over 80% of recovery. Nevertheless, organic pollutants such as oil and surfactant were identified as serious barriers for the application of MD. Further works will be required to develop the optimum pretreatment for this MD process.

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