From Fire to Water

Abstract

This article presents the transformation of drilling and fracturing industry. More recent efforts have studied the use of flared gas to treat the flowback water that follows fracking. While the emergence of such technologies is encouraging, the solutions involve expensive infrastructure, which often reduces the economic advantage of flared gas utilization projects. Researchers are working to increase the performance of the condensers by coating the condenser tubes with water-shedding super-hydrophobic materials, which drain the condensed water and can increase the thermal performance by a factor of ten. The paper also discusses the benefits of a solution named atmospheric water harvesting (AWH). AWH can benefit oil-producing regions such as the Middle East and portions of Africa, which flare large volumes of gas, face perpetual water crises, and have year-round high humidity. The technology can also be positioned as an alternative to desalination in humid places with high flaring rates, but which lack brackish water sources that could be treated.