Clean oil and gas wastewater, make more energy
Oil and gas operations in the United States produce about 21 billion barrels of wastewater per year. The saltiness of the water and the organic contaminants it contains have traditionally made treatment difficult and expensive.
Engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder have invented a simpler process that can simultaneously remove both salts and organic contaminants from the wastewater, all while producing additional energy. The new technique, which relies on a microbe-powered battery, was recently published in the journal Environmental Science Water Research & Technology as the cover story.
鈥淭he beauty of the technology is that it tackles two different problems in one single system,鈥 said Zhiyong Jason Ren, a CU-Boulder associate professor of environmental and sustainability engineering and senior author of the paper. 鈥淭he problems become mutually beneficial in our system鈥攖hey complement each other鈥攁nd the process produces energy rather than just consumes it.鈥
To try to turn the technology into a commercial reality, Ren and postdoctoral researcher Casey Forrestal have co-founded a startup company called BioElectric Inc. In recognition of his work with BioElectric, Ren has been named 2015 New Inventor of the Year by the University of Colorado . The awards are presented to researchers representing best practices in the commercialization of university technologies.
Read more at www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2015/02/24/cu-boulder-technology-could-make-treatment-and-reuse-oil-and-gas-wastewater.