Water purification technology company Aquatech has launched a high efficiency evaporation process — HEVAP — for treating produced water from oil sands thermal processes such as steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD).
The company says oil producers in Alberta, Canada, are increasingly choosing evaporation technology as the treatment method for reusing/recycling their produced water in thermal SAGD process because it offers a variety of benefits including higher water recovery rates, smaller footprint and easier operability.
But, says Alan R. Daza, vice president of sales and business development for Aquatech’s Infrastructure and Major Projects division, managing scaling has been a challenge with evaporation technology. He says Aquatech’s HEVAP evaporative process addresses this issue because it operates in a scale-free environment while also providing other process advantages to oil producers.
The HEVAP evaporative process pre-conditions the feedwater by incorporating a softening step combined with additional conditioning of the feedwater prior to treatment by the evaporators. This process provides the evaporators with essentially a scale free environment in which to operate. The company says other advantages, which help lower operating expense and life cycle costs, include:
