Removing oil left behind in 2.5B gallons of produced water every day in U.S.

Re:Removing oil left behind in 2.5B gallons of produced wate... by AWildC182 on Friday March 22, 2019 @12:18PM (#19464029)

This is super weird but just a few days ago Mike Patey (guy behind the draco bushplane [1]) posted a video [2] about his next airplane build and briefly showed a huge evap tower that he described as being for separating water produced in the petroleum industry. Oil water separation doesn't exactly sound like a millennium challenge problem so I wonder if there's some sort of grant competition right now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743960

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9MNWh8kkIM

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Re:Removing oil left behind in 2.5B gallons of produced wate... by semi-extrinsic on Friday March 22, 2019 @07:44PM (#19468003)

Oil water separation is actually really hard, it's been a huge problem for over a century. There's a lot of research being done on the topic, dozens of teams from top universities around the world working on it; just look through recent issues of Energy & Fuels, for instance.

Luckily for the environment, it is one of those cases where "more oil emitted into waterways = less money earned", through less amount of product, or less valuable product - cleaning up the oil and cleaning up the water often go hand in hand.

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