I Drink Your Sludgeshake!

You could easily start a blog called All Oil, All the Time and never run out of articles to write. This morning I found an interesting piece about sludge water. Yes, I said sludge and then I said interesting. The problem is that liquid extract in oil production produces a salty, mineralized water that averages out to a ratio of 9 out of every 10 gallons of liquid extracted here in the United States. Oh, and that water is thought to be between 30 million and 60 million years old. Mmmm. Tasty. Currently, most of this sludge water is pumped back into special wells.

Enter a privately held company called Altela which has developed a proprietary method of treating the sludge water. The results? Well, I don't have any results for Altela, but another desalinization company has a good case study: Shell was sending 30 trucks in each day to an excavation site in Wyoming to haul out 3,000 gallons of produced water per truck, 300 miles away for disposal. With desalinization technology, it cut down the process to three trucks per day. Altela's claim to fame would be that they could do the same thing with less energy.

It all sounds promising for a problem that until this morning I didn't even know existed. I feel better already. Click here for the full article.

BTW, the picture above has nothing to do with either Altela or their desalinization process. I just wanted a photo of someone who looked like a chemist.