Offshore staff
HOUSTON – ProSep is staging live demonstrations of two produced water treatment technologies at its stand at the Offshore Technology Conference.
Osorb is a regenerable absorption/adsorption media that can remove free, dispersed, emulsified and soluble hydrocarbons and oilfield chemicals from water. The media is said to have a high affinity for organic compounds and no affinity for water.
For conditioning of natural gas streams Osorb has been proven to capture heavier hydrocarbon components, ProSep claims, lowering the resultant dew point and the Wobbe index, or heating value, of the gas. It can be applied in a vessel or canister then recovered and re-used.
According to CEO Neil Poxon, a first commercial application offshore is under way in a gas-lift well in the North Sea where there is an issue with complex, soluble components.
Osorb offers several advantages over competing treatment processes, Poxon claims. “It absorbs up to 120% of its own weight in hydrocarbons and is therefore much more efficient. It provides longer bed-life and is regenerable - the media seldom has to be removed from its pressure vessel, unlike other media that need to be changed frequently. In testing our media has regenerated itself more than 100 times and still does not need to be replaced.
“Furthermore, the footprint for the Osorb equipment offshore is typically much smaller, as it only requires one pressure vessel compared with two or more for competing systems.”
TORR (Total Oil Remediation and Recovery) is a less costly coalescing media for lower volume applications that provides multi-stage separation of free floating and dispersed oil droplets in produced water. Late last year an operator offshore Bintulu, Sarawak, awarded a contract for TORR in order to comply with discharge specs.
ProSep was acquired in 2013 by Ohio-based Produced Water Absorbents. Currently the company is investing over $2 million in new headquarters and a laboratory at Houston’s Northwest Place Industrial Park. An existing 56,000-sq ft fabrication shop has recently been opened up to manufacture components such as pressure vessels for other parties, as well as ProSep’s own offshore/onshore deliveries.
05/06/2014
