E&P Notes (July 2016)

Abstract

E&P Notes Small Bubbles, Big Rewards for Separation Technology Reminiscent of the song made famous by late Hawaiian crooner Don Ho, tiny bubbles are the focal point of a new innovation aimed at transforming produced water from a costly byproduct into a valuable asset. Termed nanobubbles, they are several times smaller than a human red blood cell, which allows them to play with the physics of how dissolved gas interacts with liquids, according to Nano Gas Technologies. The suburban Chicago-based startup says its technology is capable of cheaply producing these nanobubbles to treat produced wastewater that is among the “worst of the worst.” The technology works by pushing gas, either oxygen or nitrogen, through a nozzle head that shoots the tiny bubbles into a treatment tank. The result is what the company’s chief executive officer, Len Bland, calls “fluffy water” that causes suspended solids to fall and oil to float to the top where it is easily skimmed off. “If you want to put it in technical terms,” he said, “we change the specific gravity of the liquid so that it enables the oil that is stuck in the water to rise.” Search for Flight MH 370 Shows Durability of AUVs The unprecedented search effort for Malaysian Airlines flight 370 has yet to achieve its main goal of locating the vanished aircraft and the 227 persons on board. However, it has served as an endurance test of sorts for offshore surveying systems such as the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which just a couple of years ago was considered an emerging technology with a small track record. Edward Saade, president of the ocean surveying firm Fugro Pelagos, the company contracted by the Australian government to carry out much of the search operation, said he knows of no other commercial project where AUVs have been successfully deployed for such an extensive period of time. Speaking at the 2016 Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Saade said that to cover large swaths of subsea terrain as quickly as possible and capture high-resolution data, Fugro first deployed vessels equipped with conventional deep-tow side scanning sonar. Then starting in January of last year, the AUV vessel was deployed from Perth. “The purpose of the AUV was to try and get into all those areas that turned out to be blocked in the side-scan operation, either by the steep slopes or other types of data anomalies,” Saade said. “We would preprogram the AUV, launch it and it would do its thing for about 24–28 hours and very effectively fill in all the gaps.”