“We are excited with the progress and results of the H2Ocean Spectrum technology pilot”, said Amanda Brock, CEO of Water Standard. “We are able to closely control hardness and salinity in treated water – even focusing on selective ion removal – to match the reservoir’s geochemistry within strict requirements prescribed by the oilfield production chemists. By optimizing compatibility of the water used in chemical EOR applications with reservoir geochemistry, it is possible to increase an oil well’s yield by 5 to 15 percent while significantly reducing the use of oilfield chemicals.”

The significance of water quality in EOR waterfloods is emerging as a critical element in EOR projects globally. Encouraged by laboratory tests and field studies demonstrating increased hydrocarbon recovery by using customized injection water in low salinity water or chemical floods, oil and gas operators from around the world are visiting Water Standard’s pilot facility to learn about the technology’s capabilities.

Water Standard is also piloting and evaluating a new generation of experimental and commercial reverse osmosis and nanofiltration membrane technologies.

Water Standard is working with several oil producers to develop a targeted approach to meet their unique water treatment requirements. “It’s no longer simply a matter of desalinating seawater, it’s necessary for us to work with the oil companies to understand the entire production process so that we can develop a system that can be fine-tuned to meet a specific project goal,” said Brock.

For information on touring the H2Ocean Spectrum™ pilot in Alamogordo, New Mexico, please contact Maria Cruickshank at mcruickshank@waterstandard.com.

About Water Standard
WATER STANDARD is a global water treatment specialist and recognized leader in delivering innovative desalination, water-based enhanced oil recovery and produced water solutions to the onshore and offshore oil & gas industry. The company uses proprietary designs and processes employing proven technologies incorporated into mobile offshore facilities or modular onshore customized water treatment systems. WATER STANDARD offers flexible contract options for products and services ranging from specialized engineering and design to turnkey and fully outsourced OPEX solutions. For more information visit: www.waterstandard.com.

The theme of the 2012 Symposium is “Issues and Options in an Uncertain World” and the event will feature leading-edge, breakthrough IOR technologies for application on a global scale.

WATER STANDARD is proud to sponsor a special recognition luncheon on April 17, during which four distinguished “IOR Pioneers” will be honored for their significant contributions to the fields of improved oil recovery and enhanced oil recovery.

WATER STANDARD’s Chief Technology Officer, Lisa Henthorne will also present a technical paper during the symposium. For more information please visist: www.speior.org.

Several projects under way at desalination facility in Alamogordo
Excerpted from: Alamogordo Daily News, 04/04/2012

Two groundbreaking projects are under way at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility [BGNDRF] on La Velle Road, and the facility gave a media tour Tuesday.

[Randall Shaw, BGNDRF facility manager], said Water Standard, a company from [Texas], is [...] working on a pilot project at the facility that aims to get more oil during oil extraction.

Shaw said since BGNDRF’s grand opening in 2007, the facility has become busier each passing year with a growing number of clients. The facility is owned by the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation. He explained the facility’s mission is to advance technology to treat brackish water, bridge the gap between science and engineering, and speed desalination technology to the marketplace.

Shaw said anyone with a valid desalination pilot project can come to the facility to test it. BGNDRF clients are usually universities, private companies and other government agencies. He said New Mexico State University is BGNDRF’s biggest partner, and BGNDRF has a cooperative agreement with NMSU.

Lisa Henthone, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Water Standard, said her company is evaluating water treatment membranes for use in the oil and gas industry. She explained they are treating seawater to use it to enhance oil recovery.

Henthone said Water Standard has been at BGNDRF since early February. “The facility is marvelous,” Henthone said. “This is the nicest pilot testing lab I’ve ever seen.”

Henthone said with Water Standard’s new technology, companies can get from 5 to 20 percent more oil out of an existing reservoir. She made a presentation to representatives from the National Oil Company of Maylasia, who were at BGNDRF on Tuesday because they are interested in the technology. Henthone said other countries are interested as well.

The Water and Energy Nexus panel, chaired by WATER STANDARD CEO Amanda Brock, brought together speakers from Heckmann Corporation, Dow, MI Swaco/Schlumberger, FilterBoxx and Tudor Pickering who discussed whether water treatment technology can address the energy industry’s water challenges without compromising the environment. The consensus was that water is one of the biggest obstacles standing between the U.S. and energy independence and water technology will play a pivotal role in achieving the goal of U.S. energy independence.

Click to download Balancing the Need for Energy Independence, Water Security, WATER STANDARD CEO Amanda Brock’s December column in American Water Intelligence.

The system to be designed will be used in a chemically enhanced oil recovery (CEOR) project for Petronas’ Angsi oil and gas complex offshore Malaysia, to achieve an incremental oil recovery of up to 20 percent. Most people imagine an oil reservoir as being a big underground void filled with oil; nothing could be further from reality. Most reservoirs consist of tight rock formations that resemble concrete. In CEOR projects, the water/chemical solution – a mixture of desalted or softened seawater with alkali, surfactants and/or polymer (ASP) additives – must be pumped through the formation at pressures of up to 10,000 psi (690 bar) to produce residual oil.

According to Water Standard’s chief technology officer Lisa Henthorne, water chemistry is the key to a successful CEOR project. “Unlike a typical seawater desal plant where the goal is to provide potable water or to meet a maximum TDS and boron limit, these projects require a very exacting and customized water chemistry based on the specific reservoir geology, ASP cocktail and formation clay composition.
The injection water must be compatible with the formation and work in tandem with the ASP chemicals to enhance oil removal, while pushing the oil through the formation without precipitation,” she said. “It’s tricky business.”

A pilot project has already been conducted and a tender is expected to be floated before the end of the year for a turnkey contract on the vessel conversion. The Angsi project is believed to be the first vessel-based chemical EOR project in the world. Petronas has set a target of starting up the Angsi chemical EOR project by 2013.

Source: Water Desalination Report Volume 47, Number 29 – Global Water Intelligence.

22 July 2011 01:48 GMT

Water Standard and MMC are understood to have started this week a three-month basic engineering study on potentially the world’s first vessel-based chemical enhanced oil recovery scheme at Angsi.

At the heart of Angsi chemical enhanced oil recovery is a barge or ship-shaped vessel with 15 days of storage required to support a water injection capacity of 150,000 barrels per day. The study is expected to mature the operational aspects of the vessel, including the mooring system and the chemical composition to be used for the reservoir injection. Two chemical mixtures will be evaluated — the first is a combination of alkali, surfactant and polymer with treated reverse osmosis water and the second a concoction of super surfactant and polymer with filtered seawater.

The Angsi pair will also undertake engineering work on modification to the Angsi central processing platform and a satellite platform plus interplatform flowlines.

Petronas has set an ambitious target of starting up the Angsi chemical enhanced oil recovery by 2013, which implies the vessel will have to be converted rather than built from scratch. Industry sources also expect a separate tender to be floated before the end of the year for a turnkey contract on the vessel conversion.

The Angsi chemical enhanced oil recovery scheme will be the first ever vessel-based chemical enhanced oil recovery project in Malaysia and possibly in the world. Petronas has teamed with with Shell also on a chemical enhanced oil recovery scheme at St Joseph.

The recently concluded joint study between Shell and Petronas for St Joseph proposes a pilot for alkali, surfactant and polymer flood to be run before full field implementation. Industry sources consider Water Standard and MMC the frontrunners for the engineering work any St Joseph pilot, but a final contract will be subject to several conditions, including an enhanced oil recovery PSC between Shell and Petronas.

The proposal on the table for the St Joseph pilot is a chemical enhanced oil recovery vessel to be moored in the northern part of the producing field.

WATER STANDARD provides specialized water treatment services and proprietary process solutions and designs for water-based enhanced oil recovery and produced water. Led by a recognized team with decades of experience in water treatment, marine and offshore project development, and supported by its growing IP portfolio, WATER STANDARD offers innovative state-of-the-art EOR solutions to deliver customized reservoir-specific product water chemistry, maximizing oil recovery through every phase of injection.

“We are extremely pleased to collaborate with Samsung Heavy Industries”, remarked Amanda Brock, WATER STANDARD CEO. “This partnership combines WATER STANDARD’s unique strengths and focus on a market that is growing rapidly with Samsung Heavy Industries’ globally recognized track record as one of the world’s leading ship builders, pioneering the construction of next-generation and value-added vessels for the offshore oil and gas industry.”

“We are very much pleased to work with WATER STANDARD for the desalination vessel project which will mark the world’s first and ground breaking achievement in that sector,” said a senior spokesperson from Samsung.

Just as it appeared to be closing in on several prospective projects, the global economic downturn stalled the projects Water Standard had been pursuing. The once-promising market showed no signs of materializing in the near future, forcing Water Standard’s CEO Amanda Brock to look for other options.

“By that time, we had developed a great team and an innovative technical solution. Suddenly, we had to re-group and consider which other markets might be interested in our technology. What we found is a market that is not only growing, but one that is growing exponentially with both offshore and onshore opportunities,” said Brock.

She is referring to the oil and gas industry’s exploration and production markets – more specifically, the growing interest in the use of desal technology to produce “designer” water for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects. In one type of EOR project known as waterflooding, water is injected into an underground reservoir formation to displace residual oil.

According to Lisa Henthorne, Water Standard’s chief technology officer, it is possible to produce as much as 5 to 15 percent more oil from a reservoir by carefully controlling the chemistry of the water used for waterflooding. “Saline water tends to stick to the rocks. However, by reducing its salinity, the water becomes more mobile, and more oil can be produced,” she said.

Unlike potable water, which requires a dissolved solids level of less than 500 mg/L, Water Standard is usually able to meet an oil company’s waterflooding objectives by lowering injected water salinity levels to between 1,000 and 10,000 mg/L. This “low-salinity” water is not only able to release more water from the rock formations, but it also requires fewer polymers, surfactants and other chemicals to sweep the oil from the formation.

Henthorne stressed that EOR water chemistry requirements are formation-specific, and they may vary significantly over the life of the reservoir, noting, “Water Standard has designed a standardized desal system that can use almost any membrane and is able to operate over a wide operating pressure range to produce the same, or the required, water quality regardless of feedwater temperatures, salinities or chemistry.”

The company has imported proven technology from the municipal market sector and developed proprietary designs and an innovative approach to apply it to the complex water treatment chemistry in EOR and produced water applications. It is an approach, she says, that is applicable to offshore and onshore EOR projects ranging from 30,000 bbl/d to more than 250,000 bbl/d.

According to Brock, the company’s focus on the oil industry has already met with success. “Following a successful HAZID [hazard identification] analysis and technical feasibility study with Shell Oil, we have just signed a multi-year global frame agreement to continue to work on the development of water-based EOR and produced water treatment projects,” she said.

“We have just completed a desalination membrane study for offshore, water-based polymer floods for a major oil company and have several other offshore projects currently under evaluation. In addition, we are currently in the design stage for onshore demonstration projects for produced water treatment for chemical EOR re-injection.”

At least one water analyst seems to agree with Water Standard’s prospects. In its newly released Water Sector Handbook, Citigroup’s Deane Dray says, “In another example of the nexus of water and energy, oil drillers can improve the yield in mature wells by pumping desalinated water into the [oil] field. This is creating an interesting new market opportunity for the private company, Water Standard, which has patents on vessel-based desalination systems.”

Source: Water Desalination Report – Volume 47, Number 23

WATER STANDARD is a recognized leader in water treatment and the design of vessel based mobile solutions and customized water on-demand using proprietary designs and proven, breakthrough technologies for enhanced oil recovery and produced water for the onshore and offshore oil and gas industry.