Produced Water: An overview of treatment technologies

Abstract

Produced water is one of the single most significant waste streams in the oil and gas industry, and because it is a residue of complex chemical composition, it can't be simply discarded in the environment, it should receive appropriate treatments before. This paper presents a mapping of the quantitative evolution, referring to the leading publications on the study of water produced with a focus on treatments. A bibliometric method was then adopted to build a structured database with the selected articles and then analyzed the number of publications, countries, areas of impact, authors, keywords, periodicals, and affiliations. The thematic has proved to be an essential line of research over the years. The analysis was considered in the period between 1969 and 2017. Several indicators were observed regarding the development of academic and technological research on water produced as well as its treatment processes. The study was performed in the Scopus database search engine to gather data, and 2434 documents were identified, with 851 articles investigated more specifically. This paper highlights the need for constant future studies about the produced water to minimize not only pollution but also reduce operating costs.