Oil production enhancement through a standardized brine treatment. Final report

摘要

In order to permit the environmentally safe discharge of brines produced from oil wells in Pennsylvania to the surface waters of the Commonwealth and to rapidly bring as many wells as possible into compliance with the law, the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Association (POGAM) approached the Pennsylvania State University to develop a program designed to demonstrate that a treatment process to meet acceptable discharge conditions and effluent limitations can be standardized for all potential stripper wells brine discharge. After the initial studies, the first phase of this project was initiated. A bench-scale prototype model was developed for conducting experiments in laboratory conditions. The experiments pursued in the laboratory conditions were focused on the removal of ferrous iron from synthetically made brine. Iron was selected as the primary heavy metal for studying the efficiency of the treatment process. The results of a number of experiments in the lab were indicative of the capability of the proposed brine treatment process in the removal of iron. Concurrent with the laboratory experiments, a comprehensive and extensive kinetic study was initiated. This study was necessary to provide the required data base for process modeling. This study included the investigation of the critical pH as well as the rate and order of reactions of the studied elements: aluminum, lead, zinc, and copper. In the second phase of this project, a field-based prototype was developed to evaluate and demonstrate the treatment process effectiveness. These experiments were conducted under various conditions and included the testing on five brines from different locations with various dissolved constituents. The outcome of this research has been a software package, currently based on iron's reactivity, to be used for design purposes. The developed computer program was refined as far as possible using the results from laboratory and field experiments.