Assessing the potential and limitations of membrane-based technologies for the treatment of oilfield produced water

In this study, the recent advances in standalone membrane technologies were investi-gated for produced water treatment and reclamation. The effect of operating parameters (i.e. tem-perature, flow rate, velocity, and pH) on membrane fouling were studied in detail. Results showed that microfiltration suffered severe fouling from suspended particles and flux deterioration reacheed 90 % in less than 1 h. Ultrafiltration showed enhanced removal of oil up to 95 % however, mem-brane hydrophilicity needs to be increased and the suspended particulates should be minimized to sustain operation. Nanofiltration was more prone to fouling with maximum oil removal 99 % and removal of 10 % to 20 % of dissolved solids. Reverse osmosis (RO) performance decreased rapidly against mild salts and oil concentrations in the range of 2000 ppm salts and 150 ppm crude oil and was therefore not suitable for standalone. Developed technologies such as membrane distillation (MD) and forward osmosis (FO) showed remarkable operation stability against high concentra-tions of oil and salts (1000 ppm crude oil and up to 150,000 ppm of salts). Hybridization of nanofil-tration or RO with MD or FO processes showed promising results in pilot tests.(c) 2022 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study investigated the recent advances in standalone membrane technologies for produced water treatment and reclamation. The effect of operating parameters on membrane fouling was studied in detail. Different membrane technologies showed varying degrees of effectiveness in removing oil and dissolved solids, and hybridization of certain processes showed promising results in pilot tests.