Pervaporation Desalination of High Salinity Oil and Gas Produced Waters

This presentation will cover our work to date in developing and testing new membrane materials for use in pervaporation desalination applications. Our work has specifically targeted high TDS produced waters (TDS > 50,000 mg/L) as these are the most challenging for conventional membrane based desalination systems. This is relevant to brackish water desalination and concentrate disposal as both must deal with the treatment of high salinity waters. The paper outlines flux rates achieved as a function of source water chemistry/composition, membrane fouling as a function of organic content in the source water, and a comparative analysis to other approaches for desalting high TDS waters.