€13.8 million project awarded to PPU
Despite the challenges posed by coronavirus, PPU Umwelttechnik GmbH (ClearFox®) continues to strengthen our position as a leading player in the global industrial wastewater treatment market.
Building on previous projects already completed in the oil and gas sector,we have now received a new order for a modular produced water treatment system for a large international oil and gas company operating in North Africa.
This is the second such order we have received in the last three months.
The treatment and cleaning of produced water is a growing issue globally. In the past, lack of environmental legislation and enforcement of standards allowed produced water to be discharged directly into the environment without treatment. Growing awareness regarding the importance of natural resources means that many oil and gas companies are now implementing solutions to try and treat and clean this produced water before it is discharged into the environment. Produced water is a very complex type of wastewater, and is extremely difficult to clean. In the past many of the process technologies offered by wastewater treatment companies have had extremely high CAPEX and OPEX costs. Lower oil prices means that implementing these expensive solutions is no longer cost-effective.
PPU has developed a modular produced water treatment system comprising multiple process technologies used in series. These include mechanical pre-treatment, physical and chemical treatment using dissolved air flotation (ClearFox® DAF), advanced oxidation (ClearFox® DiOx) using diamond coated electrodes, and specialist ClearFox® FBBR biological treatment that can handle high TDS. Depending on the effluent standards that need to be achieved, an ultrafiltration step may be added.
With our modular and mobile solution we are able to build wastewater treatment plants off-site for a fraction of the cost of building fixed wastewater treatment plants on site. In addition to this, our process technology has far lower operational costs than the traditional process technologies used for treating and cleaning produced water. This is very important with lower oil prices. Implementing extremely expensive solutions on sites means that many less productive drilling fields can lose their competitiveness. However, with our solution we have addressed this issue.
This specific project is being installed in an onshore location in Egypt. The project is being completed with our partners resource engineering and petrojet. The complete wastewater treatment system will be manufactured in five months, and installed on site in less than four weeks. The system is designed to handle 5000 m³ of produced water per day with scope to expand. This produced water has a TDS for approximately 200,000 mg/L, with a COD of greater than 5000 mg/L. The wastewater also contains very high concentrations of heavy metals. When operational our solution will clean this wastewater to allow safe discharge to the sea with COD levels in the effluent less than 100 mg/L and all heavy metals removed.
