Siemens' new water treatment system designed to handle wastewater from shale drilling
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Kevin Warheit, a product manager with Siemens, holds two samples of flowback water. The water on the left has been treated with a polymer and coagulant to make the particles form a sludge. The sludge is then put into a filter press and made into a nontoxic cake that can be disposed of. -
Frack treatment tanks at Advanced Waste Services in New Castle. The water flows through several compartments in the tank, then is stored in the tanks behind.
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Cakes produced daily at Advanced Waste Services in New Castle are not the edible kind.
The dense, 16-square-foot, slate-like rectangles are made entirely of sludge, the dry solid residual that results from treating industrial wastewater. It may sound mundane, but the so-called filter cakes and the technology that produces them are a "perfect storm" of recycling, according to facility manager Pat Russell.
And that perfect storm is part of a wave of technology that has surged in response to logistical and environmental challenges created by Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling, an enterprise that has brought both business and controversy to Pennsylvania and other states touched by the boom.
PG VIDEO: CLEANUP JOBAdvanced Waste Services, a division of an environmental services company headquartered in West Allis, Wis., has been treating industrial waste and wastewater created by the hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" process, a drilling technique that creates small fissures in the rock to free the natural gases contained there, since 2007.
The company's business has grown as fracking has taken off in Pennsylvania alongside the region's natural gas boom and frenzied Marcellus Shale drilling of the past three years. In May, the industrial waste treatment facility began trying out a new system created by Cranberry-based Siemens Water Technologies, a division of German corporation Siemens.
The goal is to further streamline the disposal and reuse of waste in the industry.
"It's all about the preservation of water," said Anthony Cialella, vice president and tri-state regional manager of Advanced Waste Services. "Water is our most precious resource, and without it we wouldn't be here. We're taking the containments out of it and returning it cleaner."
Siemens' new wastewater treatment system aims to streamline the way in which fracking water is recycled by reducing the net amount of waste to be disposed of and by making the process more efficient.
Tioga County installed a similar unit last fall, designed to treat nearly 300,000 gallons of water from Marcellus Shale drilling and other local operating wells each day. Siemens also hopes to bring the water treatment units directly to well sites, thereby eliminating costs associated with transporting water to and from a treatment facility.
First Published August 12, 2011 12:00 am
