Our Innovation Analysts recently looked into emerging technologies and up-and-coming startups working on innovative solutions for the energy industry. As there is a large number of startups working on a wide variety of solutions, we want to share our insights with you. This time, you will discover 5 promising produced water treatment solutions.
Heat Map: 5 Top Produced Water Treatment Solutions
Using our StartUs Insights Discovery Platform, covering 1.379.000+ startups & scaleups globally, we looked at innovation in the field of oil & gas (O&G). For this research, we identified 122 relevant solutions and picked 5 to showcase below. These companies were chosen based on a data-driven startup scouting approach, taking into account factors such as location, founding year, and relevance of technology, among others. Depending on your specific criteria, the top picks might look entirely different.
The Global Startup Heat Map below highlights 5 startups & scaleups developing produced water treatment solutions. Moreover, the Heat Map reveals regions that observe a high startup activity and illustrates the geographic distribution of all 122 companies we analyzed for this specific topic.
SEM – Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF)
Dissolved air flotation is an alternative clarification process ideal for treating raw water with light particles, such as algae or color-causing organics, and at low temperatures when sedimentation is not as effective. DAF is a well-established sludge thickening process that’s also proficient at removing oil and grease from produced waters. The process achieves lower effluent turbidity than settling.
SEM is a British scaleup that offers wastewater treatment solutions like DAF, sorption, filtration, liquid separation, and real-time quality sensors. SEM’s intelligent DAF solution maximizes the removal of total suspended solids (TSS), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), heavy metals, fats oils, and greases (FOG). This assists in maintaining the equipment and infrastructure safe and clean, while also protecting personnel and preserving the environment.
Ceraflo – Membrane Bioreactor (MBR)
A membrane bioreactor uses a submerged hollow fiber in combination with processes like microfiltration or ultrafiltration in an activated sludge process. Bioreactors find widespread application in biological wastewater treatment. On average, MBR removes up to 60% of the chemical oxygen demand in a sample. Further, the MBR system effectively removes the total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) from produced water, contributing to a significant improvement in effluent quality.
Ceraflo is a Singaporean scaleup that offers produced water treatments for the oil & gas industry. This scaleup’s membrane bioreactor offers a polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) hollow fiber membrane system. The membranes remove solids and oil to meet fracking water standards. The bioreactor is customizable to meet customer’s needs and provides a cost-effective, high-quality, and sustainably produced water treatment system.
XRI – Chemical Filtration & Disinfection
Chemicals used in fracking operations enter produced water in traces and sometimes in significant amounts, varying across platforms. Active ingredients partition themselves into all phases present depending on their relative solubilities in oil, gas, or water. Moreover, removal of these involves chemical flocculation and solids removal, microfiltration or ultrafiltration, or disinfection using chlorine dioxide.
XRI is a US-based startup that offers 3 proprietary systems for produced water treatment. The startup’s automated ROVER, SCOUT, and MAVREX systems effectively eliminate the need for produced water transport, disposal, and freshwater sourcing. This also enables operators to save at least 30% and up to 80% on water management costs.
Catapult Water Midstream – Sustainable Water Solutions
The oil & gas industry is continually changing and facing more sustainability challenges lately. Processes like hydraulic fracturing and drilling use large volumes of freshwater mixed with chemicals and proppant (sand) that come back during production. For sustainable freshwater use, startups treat and recycle produced water, and reuse it in fracking.
Catapult Water Midstream is a Canadian startup that works to reduce the amount of fresh water sourced from lakes and rivers. The startup’s integrated services provide valuable water security through the treatment and storage of water that is reused in oil & gas completions. Further, Catapult helps maximize project economics through their smart solutions for a safer and sustainable environment.
Waterfield Midstream – Disposal Services
Environmental regulations prohibit the discharge of produced water from the production sites into surface waters due to environmental safety concerns. Fracking operators generally treat water to remove the contaminants. Produced water is disposed of in specialized injection wells, when not needed, for future fracking operations. As a result, this mitigates the risk to the environment.
Waterfield Midstream is a US-based startup that provides midstream solutions for water management challenges. The startup develops efficient and scalable infrastructure solutions to operate some of the largest produced water gathering pipelines, facilities, and subsurface reservoir disposal systems.
The startup also offers treatment and recycling solutions as per customer specifications.
What About The Other 117 Solutions?
While we believe data is key to creating insights it can be easy to be overwhelmed by it. Our ambition is to create a comprehensive overview and provide actionable innovation intelligence and enable you to achieve your goals faster. The 5 produced water treatment solutions showcased above are promising examples out of 122 we analyzed for this article. To identify the most relevant solutions based on your specific criteria, get in touch.
