Artificial intelligence-based software developed by Water Planet is being used to evaluate the performance and economics of treating produced water for agricultural reuse in a pilot project in Wasco, California.
The project, which is being done with Sweetwater Tech Resources, utilizes Water Planet’s IMS- 5000 integrated produced-water treatment solution powered by its IntelliFlux software. “We are currently running a series of demonstrations using a range of waters provided by a consortium of California oil producers to evaluate treating produced water for potential use in agricultural irrigation. Our goals are to assess the water quality that can be achieved and the cost of doing so,” said chief executive officer of Water Planet, Eric Hoek.
Preliminary results are expected to be available in May, and will be passed along to regulators.
IMS-5000 is a mechanical and ceramic membrane filtration system developed to perform in oil and gas produced water treatment. As a control, Water Planet ran a standard reverse osmosis (RO) unit to desalt the brackish water that was left after treatment by the ceramic ultrafiltration membranes.
IntelliFlux learns how the filter responds to the influent water quality to determine custom-optimized flux maintenance actions. “As influent quality and membranes change over time, IntelliFlux automatically adapts and adjusts flux maintenance protocols in real-time to ensure stable system performance with maximum water recovery, process uptime and filter media useful life,” said Water Planet.
The company said IntelliFlux was membrane-agnostic, and can be used to control micro filtration, ultrafiltration, nano filtration and RO membranes as well as virtually any other filtration media that requires periodic backwashing, cleaning or regeneration.