Millions of gallons of water are needed to hydrofrack a deep-shale natural gas or oil well. And companies, seeing the dollar signs, are scrambling to dive into the water reuse business. (So if you already filled your pool, get out there and see what people will pay you for it.)
We snapped Neohydro CEO Dean Themy last week at his office in Sugar Land to learn more. Neohydro is using an electrochemistry water reuse technology, which helps companies save money by allowing them to reuse flow-back water instead of disposing of it. He’s witnessing the entrance of mid-sized companies wanting to get in the water recycling business and even larger companies like Schlumberger and Baker Hughes looking to create technology for water reuse. Dean says this is good news for Neohydro, because it’s thriving in a market he wasn’t sure would be there.
Small entrepreneurs have been developing technology to meet this need, and the big companies want to buy the technology in order to offer a full-service water solution. Only 30% of the water sent down a well flows back, so a source of water is always needed. The other 70% stays in the formation. The flow-back water has to be cleaned before it can be reused; above, Neohydro’s technology is being applied to water in the white truck and then transported into the blue truck. (The yellow containers are 20,000-gallon frack tanks). Neohydro can process 8,800 barrels of water a day or five to six barrels a minute. (We can’t even decide on a lollipop flavor in a minute.) One issue: Locals find thousands of trucks a nuisance as they clog up the roads. A solution can be finding water or buying it and having it piped to the site to eliminate the vehicles.
Neohydro charges $3 to $4 per barrel to recycle frack water. Distillation and filtration—older technologies—are not as viable because they cost $8 to $9 per barrel. Also, there is no place to store the flow-back, so treating it on the fly also saves money. In the Marcellus, only clean water can be stored in the open, such as a pond; dirty water has to be held above the ground and covered. Pennsylvania has no injection wells, so dirty water had to be transported to Ohio. It costs a company $2 per barrel of frack water an hour to be transported, in addition to $2 per barrel to dump it into the earth. It could end up costing $8 per barrel. Multiply these numbers by millions and you’ll see why more industry wants to get into this biz.
From Bisnow.