Throughout the specification, unless explicitly described to the contrary, the descriptions of the identified items are not the conventional technologies pertaining to the claims of the present application, and the description of the identified item is not meant to be the conventional technology.
The production water takes most of waste product, i.e. of oil waste, that is produced during the oil production, and is basically the entrapped underground water which is discharged out of the earth surface. The production water discharged in producing one barrel of oil is about 7˜10 barrels.
Such production water is very toxic, and contains not only ordinary oil, oil and fat, and other hydrocarbon, but large quantity of sale, metal and microelements. Accordingly, unless the production water is well controlled, it causes serious environment contamination, and the heavy cost is invested for the control of the production water.
On the other hand, the oil component extracted from oil sand called ‘bitumen’ is the black oil which is heavy and highly sticky, taking about 10-12% of the oil sand. The conventional crude oil is lighter than water, but since the bitumen has the specific gravity similar to that of water and thus does not flow in a borehole or oil pipeline under a natural state. A steam is applied or a superplasticizer is mixed to reduce the specific gravity and viscosity before transporting the bitumen to the oil pipeline.
The bitumen with steam applied contains a large quantity of water, which has to be got through oil-water separation process in order to collect the oil component. Since the production water generated after collecting the oil component still contains a large quantity of oil component and metal component, the production water has to be got through treatment process so that the production water contains oil component less than 5 ppm to be discharged or reused. In particular, in case of Canada where the abundant oil reserves are buried, but insufficient amount of underground water near oil sand exists, while the strict environment regulation is applied, the water intake available is limited, so the reuse of water is necessary.
However, in the conventional treatment process of production water, the foreign materials or the components contained in the air are flowed into the treated water stored during the reuse process, which thereby reduces not only the life time of pipeline, but the productivity.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds