The NAU team participated in the 32nd WERC Environmental Design Competition which took place on April 10-13, 2022. NAU was assigned to create a solution to their task 5 problem statement. Task 5 required teams to create a design that could meet the strict regulations that are being imposed by U.S. states on produced water (PW) recycling. Produced water recycling has come a long way in terms of sustainability by saving fresh water resources, and now these imposed regulations threaten this. These regulations would affect PW recycling impoundments which are usually open surfaced ponds. The restraints imposed would limit the potential to emit VOCs, represented by toluene, to 2 tons per year based on the potential to emit. The potential to emit VOCs does not consider the actual emissions of VOCs so it was important to create a design that could have a reduction potential of at least 96% in order to have the full scale design be able to meet these regulations.
Solutions accepted by the competition required a working bench scale model and cost efficient full scale design that could remove toluene from a synthetic PW solution at a scale of 50,000 bbl/day. For more information about the teams specific task, a link to the project statement can be found below.
The team faced the challenges listed below as they worked on the project through the 2021-2022 school year.
The ongoing pandemic requires the need for masks and social distancing when necessary. The contraction of the virus can hinder lab access, decrease the quality of communication and cancel the in-person aspect of the WERC competition altogether.
Sourcing materials for the project was constrained by a budget of approximately $1600.
As classes will be happening in the lab throughout the semester, along with other projects that also need the space, we must schedule our lab time to not overlap with others.
Since the competition takes place in New Mexico, the bench-scale model must be an appropriate size to ensure safe travel.
The produced water solution used during testing and the competition was a synthetic sample of produced water based on water characteristics of produced water from the Delaware shale play. The Delaware Basin is a basin known for its large oil fields and is located in West Texas and southern New Mexico.
After the full completion of the project, completing all tasks associated with the project on time, the team totalled 1043.65 hours. The amount of time actually spent of the project was 13% greater than the teams goal of hours spent, that being 931 hours. With that, the team estimated the cost of their engineering services to be $70,955.50. A full break down of the hours spent on each task, by each team staffing member, and how the cost of engineering services were priced can be found in the link below.
Staffing hours and cost of servicescreated with
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