Casey Cammann
Chief Marketing Officer
Heartland Water Technology, Inc.
Hudson, Massachusetts, USA

Globally, a tremendous amount of natural gas is flared and wasted as part of oil production. Total US gas flared increased from 165,928 metal-to-metal charge transfer (MMct) in 2010 to 468,347 MMct in 2018. But what if that flare could be put to use as part of the produced water treatment process?
This presentation will review findings from a recent pilot in the Western United States where a novel thermal concentration technology successfully treated produced water on site at a heavy oil production well. The concentrator reduced the volume of produced water by 98% and thus enabled a drastic reduction in disposal costs for the operator. The final concentrate contained 48.3% solids by weight and almost 490,000 mg/L total dissolved solids (TDS) and all of the thermal energy for the treatment process was generated by flaring readily available wellhead gas. Additionally, the process was able to remove 100% of BTEX Compounds.