
Removing oil left behind in 2.5B gallons of produced water every day in U.S. - howard941
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2019/Q1/what-oil-leaves-behind-in-2.5-billion-gallons-of-water-every-day-in-u.s..html
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ChuckMcM
This is a great result, and then we get to this:

From the article -- _Researchers are working with the Purdue Research
Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization to patent the innovation,
and they are looking for partners to continue developing it._

What is the public good of patenting a process that would make usable water
more available? Doesn't this graduate student get what they paid for? An
advanced degree in chemical engineering from a prestigious school? Doesn't the
school get what it wants from this, a reputation for doing solid research into
big problems and coming up with good answers?

And then they want to take the idea out of considering by applying a 'tax' to
it so that the university can extract some rent on work they have already been
paid for. I find that so unpalatable.

~~~
ska
It's a fairly natural outgrowth of the pressure (since 80s) to run (public)
universities "more like a business". Funding was cut and restructured, a
professional class of management moved in, and universities were
encourages/mandated to look for new sources of revenue. One of the common
variants of this was to develop fairly aggressive "technology transfer"
offices. The idea being that IP was being developed, but not monetized. It
hasn't been super successful, for a bunch of reasons.

~~~
mrmuagi
Do you have any sources one could read into?

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infinite8s
Look up the history of the Bayh-Dole act.

~~~
mrmuagi
Cheers mate, I love reading about history.

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pjc50
Assuming this works and is scalable, it's potentially a game-changer for Saudi
Arabia.

All wells produce water along with the oil. Great background from the old
theoildrum blog:
[http://theoildrum.com/node/6052](http://theoildrum.com/node/6052) and
[http://theoildrum.com/node/9045](http://theoildrum.com/node/9045)

The "water cut" is the percentage of water in the fluid coming out of the
drill hole. Normally this is a disposal problem. If it's drinkable (and not
saline!), Saudi no longer need to desalinate quite so much water, they can
just use the water from the oil wells.

~~~
yscik
It is highly saline, according to the first article, more so than seawater.

~~~
jackfoxy
You could say water from the depth of most petroleum reservoirs underground is
_naturally_ polluted. It can be more than just saline polluted. Pretty much
anything that can be in the earth and can mix with water.

There are cases of shallower reservoirs where the petroleum is mixed with
otherwise potable water. If it is within an agricultural area, like
Bakersfield, it may be treated and used for irrigation. The treatment is
mostly just multiple steps of skimming off petroleum.

~~~
ascar
While I don't necessarily disagree with your first statement, your second
statement seems to put things in the wrong light.

> _It can be more than just saline polluted. Pretty much anything that can be
> in the earth and can mix with water._

Most water we drink is rain filtered through many different layers of earth.
It's the cleanest source of freshwater we have. Minerals only mix to a very
small percentage with the water during this process and this "pollution" is
actually wanted to a certain degree, i.e. mineral water.

~~~
njarboe
Rock layers on the surface of the earth that have water running through them
that are drinkable have had rain water removing the elements and chemicals
harmful to life for, generally, millions of years. The best water often comes
from rock that was actually created by life (limestones, dolomites, etc), so
that it had almost no harmful chemicals in it to begin with.

The poster you are disagreeing with is correct. The deep earth is full of
really toxic stuff. Arsenic, lead, sulfur, radon, etc. Then there is the deep
oil and gas, salt domes, asbestos. Huge volcanic eruptions called flood
basalts are likely the cause of many mass extinctions due to the chemistry of
the eruptions, not the ash. The mother Earth we all love is just the little
skin on top of a cauldron of death.

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AWildC182
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743960)

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

~~~
semi-extrinsic
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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brianbreslin
I imagine it still isn't household use ready after this since 5% of the
contaminants are still there. However if they can reuse for their own internal
purposes, that would be great.

~~~
tomatotomato37
Directly it isn't, but because it now meets the EPA standards for clean water
from industrial sources it can be discharged into regular water sources where
it dilutes and can be drawn from and further filtered by conventional water
works, which helps lesson the impact of it's water usage a lot.

~~~
hanniabu
This is something I never understood. When everybody is polluting waterways
and ground water, it doesn't really get diluted. These companies should be
forced to operate responsibly are cease operations. Everyone is for capitalism
until we start trying to hold them responsible. If we held them responsible,
they'll either adapt or they'll go under and a competitor that is able to
operate responsibly will appear.

~~~
tomatotomato37
It can still dilute if everybody is releasing different pollutants; it's only
a problem in clusters of similar industry that overwhelms intake filtering.

As to your second argument, the EPA's literal purpose is to force citizens to
operate their life/business responsibly; if you think their standards are too
lenient than take it up with your elected representative. One of my biggest
frustrations I see here are people pushing to overthrowing everything for
grand new systems, completely ignore the implementation details for such a
system, and then get frustrated when the system fails because of the details.
The system to accomplish your goals is already fucking there, use it.

~~~
hanniabu
> take it up with your elected representative.

One of my biggest frustrations I see here are people suggesting that you take
things up with your representatives as if big corporations don't control the
government.

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iamgopal
Isn't DAF and skimmer already solved this ? The article does not goes in to
details, but I reckon it's a oliophilic foam material instead of a rope or
belt that we usually use, thus increase contact area ?

Edit: my bad, this article is about using nanoparticles to increase solar
distillation efficiency.

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metaphor
Article didn't link or cite a relevant paper[1]. It's from 2018...anything
newer?

[1]
[https://doi.org/10.1115/IMECE2018-86906](https://doi.org/10.1115/IMECE2018-86906)

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euroclydon
Is this water really being "held"? For how long? It's pretty tough to
sequester water on that scale.

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allknowingfrog
I appreciate it when smart people solve problems I don't even know about.

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jMyles
The title is a little hard to parse; this paragraph cleared it up for me:

> Handling that water is a major challenge in the oil refinery industry,
> particularly because it is deemed unusable for household and commercial use
> by the Environmental Protection Agency because of remaining contaminants.
> Several commercial treatments are available, but they are expensive, do not
> remove all traces of contaminants from water and can be energy-intensive.

~~~
howard941
Thanks, I fixed up the title

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baxtr
I still don’t get it...

EDIT: the first paragraph in the linked article was very insightful

 _Purdue University researchers have developed a process to remove nearly all
traces of oil in produced water._

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howard941
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produced_water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produced_water)
may help?

~~~
jandrese
That seems like an overly flowery term. Why not use "oil well wastewater" that
a layman would understand immediately.

