Fracture Water Treatment Method and System

Abstract

A method and system for treatment of flow-back and produced water from a hydrocarbon well in which fracturing operations are carried out using a phase separation and creating of positive charge in the water.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is a continuation in part of U.S. application Ser. No. 13 / 594,497 filed Aug. 24, 2012, which claims priority to U.S. Provisional App. No. 61 / 676,628, filed Jul. 27, 2012. This application also claims priority to U.S. Divisional application Ser. No. 13 / 753,310, filed on Jan. 29, 2013.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]This invention concerns the apparatus and processing steps for treating the flow-back and produced water and the other constituents that are used to hydraulically cause the creation of channels or fractures or fissures in hydrocarbon wells (for example, deep oil-shale deposits).[0003]Over the centuries, people have tried different ways to take advantage of and use the inherent qualities of naturally-occurring hydrocarbon compounds to enhance his life style and cope with the many challenges of existence. For over two thousand years, the “Burning Sands” of Kirkuk, in Iraq, provided heat to Kurdish tribes, which c...

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Problems solved by technology

At the same time, the Industry also discovered the existence of large quantities of heavy and light hydrocarbon compound mixtures that were nonconventional in structure and were so enmeshed in the complex material matrixes that the hydrocarbon molecule compounds contained therein could not be extracted economically.

Although the shale oil proved to be a very suitable hydrocarbon product, its cost of production was well in excess of the market price of similar products; thus this situation proved to be uneconomical.

Additional development and investment was not justified at that time.

However some oil companies were concerned about the dangers in using explosives as a means of extending the productive life of depleting oil fields; and, in the late nineteen forties, the practice of using highly-pressured water and sand mixtures to produce fissures or fractures in the pay-zone areas began.

However, during the period when the application of hydraulic fracturing was becoming more wide spread, its growth, technologically and operationally, was carried out in a very haphazard, hit and miss, ad hoc manner.

Many of the improvements that were made were the result of unscientifically developed trial and error attempts to improve the rate of production in an oil well as well as trying to extend the economic life of established oil fields.

The best example of this unscientific approach, in trying to solve specific processing problems, is what was occurring in the proper selection and use of various types of proppants in the hydraulic fracturing process.

Without the proper proppants that are strong enough and correctly sized to keep the fissures continuously open, the well's production rate will decline rapidly as proppant fines and softer material particles fill up the fissures.

These will decrease the rate of flow and ultimately block the flow of hydrocarbons into the well bore.

The key issue here is that the proper proppant that should be used in a hydraulic fracturing process is the single most important factor that is needed in achieving and maintaining the proper “voids ratio” that is needed in the pressurized water fractured channels to be able to realize the full benefit of the hydraulic fracturing process.

With the introduction of steerable vertical and horizontal drilling equipment together with very high pressure fracturing pumps (called by some “intensifiers”), the oil industry then applied the same hydraulic fracturing techniques that had been successfully developed and used in vertical oil well hydraulic fracturing operations and applied these same procedures to the well bores that were horizontally drilled in the deep shale formati

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