Innovative technologies to solve oil-fields water injection sulfate problems.pdf

Desalination 201 (2006) 121–129 Innovative technologies to solve oil-fields water injection sulfate problems M.S.H. Bader Bader Engineering, Inc., P.O. Box 10675, College Station, TX 77842, USA Tel. +1 (979) 680-8000; Fax +1 (979) 680-8007; email: manny@ Received 14 March 2005; accepted 20 September 2005 Abstract In this fourth article, of a four-part series, a patented process based on the concepts of membrane distillation (MD) and liquid–phase precipitation (LPP) for selective removal of sulfate from seawater is provided. The MD– LPP process uses a small amount of energy and additive, generates minimal waste with suitable disposal paths, extracts economic values from discarded streams or species, and offers a rapid economic deployment. Innovative approaches to integrate pressure-driven membranes such as nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) in conjunction with LPP or compressed-phase precipitation (CPP) to mainly solve their inherent sulfate scale problems in treating seawater and the generation of large concentrate stream are also discussed. Keywords: Oil-fields seawater injection; New sulfate removal technologies 1. The MD–LPP process A simple flow sheet for the MD–LPP process is depicted in Fig. 1 [1–4]. The MD step concen- trates seawater to produce a stream concentrated roughly by a factor of 1.5–2, and an ultra-pure permeate stream. The target in concentrating sea- water is mainly calcium sulfate. Once the concen- tration of calcium sulfate reaches a level that is not detrimental to effective operation of MD, then LPP takes place to induce effective precipitation of calcium sulfate from the concentrated seawater. A selected amine solvent will be used as a preci- pitation agent in the LPP. The precipitated calcium sulfate will be removed from concentrated sea- water by hydrocyclones. The underflow of hydro- cyclones can be limited to less than 5% of the feed stream. The amine solvent can be nearly com- pletely recovered by vacuum membrane distilla- ti