OHM Media for Produced Water Treatment

When we talk about oil contaminated water, we mostly hear about oil spill. But the fact is produced water is largest wastewater stream that is generated by oil/gas industry during drilling and fracking operations. It is contaminated with oil and other impurities which make them unsuitable for discharge to the surface without treatment.

Globally around 250 million barrels of produced water is generated EVERYDAY which is almost 4 times of the oil production. In some areas of US, for one barrel of oil, 10 barrels of produced water is generated. Unfortunately, on average only 30% of this water is treated and re-used while 70% is disposed into saltwater disposal wells. However, in recent years, the latter method has come under increased scrutiny from both environmental groups and regulatory agencies, particularly in water stressed areas.

Current produced water treatment methods (such as coagulation, dissolved air floatation, hydrocyclones, packed media filtration, and bioremediation) are either slow, complicated, expensive, inefficient, and/or generate a lot of physical waste (due to one-time use). They fail to meet basic sustainability criteria for meaningful deployment, especially fiscal sustainability. 

As a co-founder and CTO of MFNS Tech, I am leading efforts to develop innovative products to address different types of water pollution. To address the rarely discussed issue of produced water treatment, our team at MFNS Tech has developed OHM Media.  A different formulation of OHM Sponge, the OHM Media can not only selectively remove oil from produced water in one pass but is also reusable and generates no waste; making it a simple, fast, economic, efficient, and eco-friendly technology compared to the current state-of-the-art. It is made of low cost, earth abundant, and environmentally benign materials and methods.

The OHM Media makes a compelling case for not just the environmental benefit but a practical and fiscally viable one. Use of the OHM Media as a produced water treatment will not only have commercial impact by reducing the cost and efficiency of oil (and other) contaminated water bodies remediation, but also societal impact by mitigating adverse effects on the environment, marine and human life. About half a billion ton of disposed sponge that goes to landfill can be used as a raw material of the OHM Media. Further, the re-usability of the OHM Media results in virtually no waste, with a complete circular materials economy and full sustainable cycle of “birth to burial”.