Challenges of membrane filtration for produced water treatment in offshore oil & gas production

Tremendous amount of produced water are discharged into the sea from offshore oil & gas installations. Along with every barrel of oil three barrels of water are produced and this is only worsen as the fields mature. Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is employed to increase production, as a part of EOR the Water Flooding Technology (WFT) is employed. The quality requirements for WFT and the increasing environmental concerns for produced water discharge lead to increased interest in zero-pollutant discharge. Traditional Produced Water Treatment (PWT) technologies(such as hydrocyclones) are already struggling to their fundamental limit, therefore the membrane filtration technology turns to be a potential candidate for zero-pollutant discharge. Membrane filtration technology suffers from the notorious fouling problem, where many methods for fouling prevention and removal are explored, the general idea is to guarantee that a relatively high permeability can be kept during filtration. Another crucial issue using membrane filtration technology is its huge energy consumption, for which there is little research has been done so far to systematically investigate and optimize the filtration system's energy efficiency, some smart filtration technology could contribute to handle this issue.