ABSTRACT

Creating a Faculty Incubater Group to Encourage Distributed Water Processing and Recycling (DWPR) in Oil and Gas Operations

Oil and gas production operations produce large volumes of brine water along with the petroleum resource .  Disposing of this byproduct is costly because of its composition and because of the large volumes that must be handled .   The problem is widespread, in that as more than three-fourth of the state’s counties have oil production and all have water-flood disposal operations.  Approximately 150,000,000 gallons of water are produced every day in Texas, which is equivalent to 10% of the water usage in the state, and none of it is available for recycling.  Because of advances in membrane filtration and desalination, and because of the extremely high disposal costs that could be avoided, an economical alternative to produced water disposal is now available.  Converting oilfield produced water from a possible pollutant to a valuable resource will require a multidisciplinary approach because of the many technologies involved.  A research program is needed, however, to make this technology economically attractive and to adapt it to the needs of small operators who produce most of the oil and gas in the United States.

The goal of  this project is to create a faculty incubator group as a means of building institutional capability for natural resource and environmental research, specifically in the field of water treatment.  The new group would work to develop systems that can be employed for distributed water processing and recycling (DWPR). The objectives of the group are: 1) To prove that DWPRE is technically possible and economically justifiable at the current time in certain circumstances (i.e. oil and gas production); 2) to develop designs for and prototype portable units to use in oil field operations; and 3) To create a coordinated research program promulgating the technology to broader markets and areas of application. 

This group will provide opportunity for faculty member and entrepreneurs to collaborate, increases the ability of the Univeristy to attract significant industrial and government financial support, provide graduate student research funding and generate  new ethnology that represents licensing revenues for the University.  The benefit of the program to the community would be to increase the availability of water resources that presently  limit economic stability and diversity in many regions of the state and the country, to reduce the cost of wastewater disposal and to lessen the often harmful effects on the enviornment and the populace.