Harnessing the power of the sun
Consol now treats more than 36 billion gallons of water a year, fresh water as well as acid mine drainage, said Nicholas J. DeIuliis, Consol Energy president.
“Given our extensive water assets and successful water management experience, we believe we have a valuable service to offer to the natural gas industry’s growing need for water resources,” he said.
The company’s investment in Epiphany will play a roll in the new venture, DeIuliis added. “We view Epiphany as another facet of our water management growth strategy and are very excited about the potential of this green technology and its application to multiple water treatment opportunities.”
Later this month, Epiphany will set up its solar powered water treatment system at one of Consol’s Marcellus Shale gas wells.
The company has already tested the system extensively, said Ron Pettengill, Epiphany’s executive vice president of the oil, gas and coal division. “But like anything else, you have to take things out of the laboratory and put them in the field and test them under a hostile environment,” he said.
Epiphany, formed in 2009, originally developed its system to purify drinking water. It soon realized the same technology could have other uses.
“We knew it could be used to treat water for drinking, but we realized it also could be used for water that has been used by industry that needs to be recycled,” he said. “With Marcellus right in our back yard, we figured we should look into it.”
That’s where the partnership with Consol became important. It offered Epiphany the opportunity to adapt its system to treat wastewater and to test it under “real world” conditions.
Epiphany’s system uses mirrored dishes, similar to satellite dishes, to focus and concentrate energy from the sun onto a solar collector that has thermal fluid circulating through it.
The thermal fluid heats to about 900 to 1,000 degrees and is stored in a reservoir, which Pettengill said is “almost like a battery,” which can be “bled off” to power the water distillation process even when there is no sun.
The thermal fluid heats the contaminated well water. Steam that is produced is captured and recondensed to clean water. “It’s pure distilled water, you can drink it, it’s safe,” Pettengill said.
Left behind after the water is evaporated are the impurities, such as salts and metals, that also can be put to other uses, he said.
Salt, one of the major contaminants in the well water, can be used as road salt, for example. The purified water also can be reused. “And when we get to scale, there’s probably a potential to recover a number of other minerals in the waste stream,” Pettengill said.
Part of the treatment process also will involve first running the water through a bio-reactor designed by PMC Biotec, a company based in Exton, that uses bacteria to capture minerals and various fracking fluid chemicals.
Epiphany’s system has been touted as the world’s first concentrated solar-powered water purification system. “We know it’s the first time it’s ever been used in the context of remediating shale gas frackwater,” Pettengill said.
In the pilot test, Epiphany’s system will first be used to treat production water, water that emerges from the well after the initial flowback from hydraulic fracturing.
The pilot test will involve distilling production water from the well at a rate of about 100 gallons a day, Pettengill said. The solar powered treatment system, however, can easily be expanded to treat much greater quantities of water.
Epiphany’s system is expected to drastically reduce the amount of wastewater that must be disposed of off site, Pettengill said. This will lessen the number of trucks that now have to carry wastewater from a drilling site.
“You have a minimum amount of waste, probably about one percent of the production frack water,” Pettengill said. “If you only have to transport that, instead of 100 trucks, you would need only one or two,”
This should create a real saving for a company that must dispose of millions of gallons of wastewater from its drilling sites each year.
Epiphany’s system is also expected to be much less expensive to operate than conventional treatment systems.
The system was developed with the idea that green energy also must be competitive with other systems, Pettengill said. “We believe you can have both environmental safety and economical operation in the same package,” he added.
