High Efficiency Evaporation Process launched for oil sands wastewater

Aquatech has launched the HEVAP™ high efficiency evaporation process for treating produced water from oil sands thermal processes such as Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD).

The HEVAP evaporative process pre-conditions feedwater by incorporating a softening step combined with additional conditioning of the feedwater prior to treatment by the evaporators.

Aquatech said this process provides the evaporators with essentially a scale free environment in which to operate. Other advantages, which help lower operating expense (OPEX) and life cycle costs (LCC), include:

• High allowable concentration factors
• Increased recovery of high quality reusable water
• No requirement for anti-scalants
• No requirement for EDTA dosing
• No requirement for mechanical cleaning.

Alan Daza from Aquatech's infrastructure and major projects division, said: "Increasingly, oil producers in Alberta are choosing to go with evaporation technology as the treatment method for reusing/recycling their produced water in thermal SAGD process because it offers a variety of benefits including higher water recovery rates (lower make-up / reduced blow down), smaller footprint, and easier operability. However, managing scaling has been a challenge with evaporation technology. Aquatech's HEVAP evaporative process addresses this issue as it has been engineered to operate in a scale-free environment while also providing other process advantages to oil producers."

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