INTERVIEW Acid mine drainage - alternative water supply for fracking operations Carolyn Kotsol, CEO and President, Winner Water Services Today we speak to Carolyn Kotsol, CEO and President of Winner Water Services, about water usage in hydraulic fracturing and how using purified water from abandoned mines, known as ‘acid mine drainage’ can have a positive environmental impact.
Monica Thomas (Shale Gas International): Winner Water Services takes acid mine drainage and purifies it to a degree where it can be used for hydraulic fracturing operations. So, to begin with: can you explain what acid mine drainage is? Where exactly does it come from? Carolyn Kotsol (Winner Water Services): Acid mine drainage is from coalmines and other mining industries, some of these could be mines that have been closed for decades. After mines have been closed they still leach out components form the mine, these components could be sulphates or metals; iron, manganese, magnesium, aluminium. All of the materials that leach out from those mines end up going into water streams as the earth produces. It’s in those water streams that we find what we call ‘acid mine drainage’, because it is a drain really, from these closed mines. It could be from active mines as well, but it’s primarily closed mines, where that water is secreting from the earth and it’s causing problems. It contaminates aquatic systems, so the fish and turtles and other aquatic species have contaminated water around them, oxygen is no longer able to be in the water streams and those species are exposed to some danger because of it. Another problem with acid mine drainage can be seen in streams as they are produced across the earth. It looks like they are heavily coloured, with orange or dark red material – that’s primarily iron – magnesium and aluminium can turn the area around the stream white, so you can see it as well. Some things you can’t see, like sulphates or the other metals, but we know it’s there and it’s causing
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problems to the aquatic species. So that’s basically what acid mine drainage is, material that is excreting from old mines and causing these high metals and other materials to contaminate the water stream. MT: And is it a particularly bad problem in Pennsylvania, or is it a problem that is more widespread? CK: It’s really focused on the areas where mining was prevalent, so of course Pennsylvania, West Virginia, portions of Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia – the Appalachian region. But there is another area out west that also suffers from this, and it’s Colorado. Now the mines out there they may not have been coalmines, they may have been gold or silver, or other metals that they were mining there. But those mines are still going to secrete a lot of the minerals from the earth, so Colorado, Idaho, Montana, in that region of the Rocky Mountains, they also see some acid mine drainage from the mines that were closed several decades ago. MT: That seems like a big environmental problem, doesn’t it? CK: Yes, it is a big environmental problem and what’s interesting as well is; in the Appalachian area they see a lot more rainfall than they do out in the western states, therefore what we see happening there is some of the acid mine drainage could be diluted down if you have a really wet spring or fall, or a lot of snowfall over wintertime. But when you go out west, where they struggle to get water, it becomes a different type of problem just because of the environmental precipitation. But it certainly is a widespread problem. MT: So your company takes this highly-contaminated water and you purify it so it can be used in fracking. But fracking is – or is perceived to be at least – a very dirty operation. So one would be excused in thinking that if we’re going to pump all that water into the ground, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s clean or dirty. But this is not the case, is it? CK: That’s a good question and I have a couple of points I’d like to make. First of all, in the Appalachian region, because of all this precipitation that comes down – specifically in Pennsylvania, the Marcellus, and even Utica – there are a lot of ponds, rivers, and lakes, with fresh water available for the shale gas industry. That water can also be potable water, it can be used for human consumption. So where we come in, is we take this non-potable water, in fact it’s a contaminated water stream, and clean it up to a point to where the hydraulic fracturing industry would like to see it, and that’s sort of the second point. The first point is that it’s an environmental benefit to re-use a non-potable, contaminated water stream that’s been cleaned up and purified for hydraulic fracturing, in lieu of using fresh water that
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could be used for potable sources. The second point is; in the hydraulic fracturing industry, the drillers and the producers on the backend of the process have their own recipe of chemicals that they use to push down into the earth to extract the gas. It’s a proprietary mixture of chemicals that they use to optimise the efficiencies of the well. With every recipe that these folks are using in the well, they like to have a “fresh” – and I use “fresh” in quotes there – water stream to make sure that it doesn’t add any more complexity to their recipe. With the chemicals they are using, they want to have a cleaner water stream, so they know that their mix of chemicals is still intact and will still produce the efficiency that they need to get out of that well.
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So it’s important that we provide Oil and gas companies are becoming them with a water stream that more and more environmentally doesn’t interfere with their chemicals, friendly... their shift towards being but we also want to be kind to the more environmentally conscious is environment and provide them with one of the reasons why they wanted a water stream that we’re not taking to be a part of this. away from human consumption. We’re truly purifying a contaminated stream and purifying it to provide them with a cleaner water stream that they can use.
MT: We all know that fracking operations are very water-intensive and according to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, each fracking operation requires between 10 to 30 million litres of fresh water. So how much of that water would you be able to provide through your water purification system, can you actually provide as much as 30 million litres of water from acid mine drainage? CK: Thirty million litres is equivalent to just around eight million gallons of water. So to answer your question – yes, we can provide eight million gallons. And that is the range that we see our potential customers in the oil and gas industry looking for. Winner Water Services have two locations, where we are cleaning up acid mine drainage water, and they are specifically located near the Appalachian region, so near where the Marcellus Shale activities are happening. Our facilities there are right next to a mine, one of which has been closed since 1980, and so we take the water, clean it up and then we have it available for the oil and gas industry close to the facility. And we are able to provide them with water upwards of five million gallons at a time – depending on their fracking needs.
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MT: That would certainly take away the pressure from the utilities, because from what I understand, most fracking operations – and that’s what would happen in the UK, if fracking took off here – is that the water for fracking is usually taken from utility companies and municipal sources. CK: You’re right and that’s where we really feel that it’s important that we as a company, and even our message out to environmentalists and others in the community is that the shale gas industry is a good industry; it’s an industry that provides us with a lot of energy stability as a nation, and going forward in the UK as well, provides a nation a lot of security. So it’s something that we know we want to have, but in order to do it in an environmentally safe mode and to not deplete the human consumption of this water – it’s definitely needed for humans – we try to take this contaminated stream so folks don’t have to go to the municipal water sources to purchase their water. MT: So, can you tell us a little bit more about how you go about purifying acid mine drainage? I believe you have a system called HydroFlex? CK: HydroFlex is a patented process that Winner Water has. We take the contaminated water stream that is heavy with metals – sulphate, iron, and other metals – and our process interacts with that water stream with a specific extractive blend. It’s an oil-based blend of different chemicals and because it’s oil – oil and water don’t like to be together much - it separates very well. It’s a bit like taking your oil and vinegar salad dressing; when you shake it up in the bottle and then let it sit it separates, you get the water at the bottom and the oil at the top. What we’re doing is the same thing. We’re taking this extractive blend and we’re interacting it and mixing it up with the acid mine drainage water, and in that process of mixing, a chemical reaction occurs. What happens is that ionically, this extractive blend that we have, goes out and specifically grabs the iron ions and sulphate ions, and it removes them from the water. Then we let that material sit and settle out, and in the settling process the extractant goes to the top and the clean water goes to the bottom. We then take out that clean water at the bottom and we can reach less than 100 parts per million of sulphate, often-times less than 20 parts per million of sulphate, depending on the incoming stream and how contaminated it is, and less than five parts per million of iron. So from the water that comes in, the water that leaves after it interfaces with the extractant is your cleaned water. The top layer though, the extractant, is now laden with sulphate and iron, so we need to remove that in order to re-use the extractant again. We have to make this plant’s economics work for us and be economical and competitive with other technologies and other water sources. We take the top
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portion of that blend – the extractant – and we send it through another series of steps where we remove the sulphates and the iron and then we send that cleaned extractant back to the front end of the process to interact with water once again – and repeat the process. MT: What do you do with the contaminants that are removed? How are they disposed of? I read somewhere that the sulphates that you remove can be then used to treat flowback water to remove some of the total dissolved solids. Can you tell us more about that? CK: In the portion of our process where we clean up the extractant, we use a sodium carbonate, so again we have an ionic exchange going on where the sodium and the sulphate counter-act with the carbonate. So now we have this sodium sulphate material that we create in the back end and sodium ferrate, that’s like an iron material, that comes off. The sodium sulphate, specifically, can be reused as a potential co-product for the oil and gas industry. We create that as we extract the sulphate back off of our extractant, it’s intermingled with a sodium carbonate so the end material is a sodium sulphate and that is our co-product that could be reused. Sodium sulphate is one of those materials that the oil and gas industry uses in the recipe that I mentioned earlier on, in that mix of chemicals that they use in wells. MT: When it comes to flowback water, is it also something that you would be looking at purifying or are you just concentrating on the acid mine drainage? CK: We look at other water streams as well. Acid mine drainage is where we had started our investigation, but as our plant operates and gives us more encouraging data, we are looking at flowback water, at produced water, and looking closely at how HydroFlex, or perhaps other technologies could be integrated to clean up those water streams as well. MT: I read about your cooperation with the non-profit research and development organization Battelle. Can you tell us how the idea for the Hydro Flex system came about? CK: The origin of HydroFlex did come out of Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, and it was around 2003 when they developed this technology for mining water. So whether it was coal, gold or silver mining operations, Battelle was looking at the water stream that was discharged from those plants and cleaning it up to produce a cleaner water stream from it.
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Winner Water Services was created in 2013 as a part of a partnership with Battelle, we are primarily owned by Battelle and the Winner family – that’s a family out of Sharon, Pennsylvania, who also came forward with a contribution to form this company. So we are a split; 58 percent owned by Battelle, 42 percent owned by the Winner family, and in that forming of the Winner Water Services, Battelle has provided the IP and the know-how behind running and using HydroFlex in these applications and the Winner family has IP as well, that they provided to form the company. So the idea started at Battelle Memorial Institute and evolved through the years and in the ten years between 2003 and 2013, Battelle and the Winner family went from the bench scale in the lab to create a pilot scale in St Michael’s, Pennsylvania, and ran that plant for a few years, and now we are set up as a company, Winner Water Services, where we are running our plants at 100 gallons per minute rate, to further commercialise this technology. We have two plants running. One is in Sykesville, Pennsylvania, the other is in Sarver Pennsylvania. Now only one of the plants, the plant in Sarver, has HydroFlex running on it. In the plant in Sykesville, we use other technologies that we have available to us in our portfolio. MT: I wanted to ask you about efficiencies. Because the water that you are selling to the shale drillers – the environmental dimension of it is huge and incredibly important – but money-wise, is that water cheaper than what they would get from utilities companies or is there a premium to be paid for it being more environmentally-friendly? CK: We are cost-competitive with the other water streams that they have available. The biggest factor in the cost – when you look at the economics behind all this – is the transportation cost. So it’s where our plant is physically located relative to where the end well is located. If you have a 30-mile distance between the two, the cost of getting it from our facility to the well could be higher than if they had a source that is closer to their site. It really comes down to that transportation cost. But in terms of straight-up costs per thousand gallons, we are very competitive. In fact, sometimes we are less expensive than municipal water sources. MT: Am I correct in thinking that your facilities are located close to the mines, rather than close to the wells? CK: Not necessarily – it could be both. For instance, at our facility in Sykesville; there are wells that are five or six miles away; very close, and the water stream that we are processing is right there as well, so there are times where the acid mine drainage and the well are very close to one another. In the Appalachian region, because there is so much fresh water from ponds and lakes available, the pond may be closer to the wellsite than the acid mine drainage site.
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That’s where our second benefit of providing an environmental reason comes into play. MT: Would you say that U.S. shale drillers are now becoming more environmentally conscious and willing to minimise the environmental footprint of their operations? CK: In the Appalachian region, I would say that oil and gas companies are becoming more and more environmentally friendly, and I say that because they are reusing a lot of their flowback water – from the well itself. Disposing of that water is very expensive, so there certainly was a cost-impact to their bottom line in doing that, but they are becoming more environmentally-friendly. With the Sarver, Pennsylvania plant – we are operating under a Department of Energy grant. So the DoE has provided us with money to demonstrate our technology for the shale gas industry. A part of our deliverable back to the DoE is having a stakeholders’ session, and during the stakeholder sessions we meet with these groups, and Battelle is also a part of this, they are very active. Every quarter we get together with the stakeholders, and among the stakeholders are the oil and gas participants; Statoil and other participants that are on the stakeholder committee. We hear directly from them, what they want to see in terms of how clean the water needs to be, but we’re also hearing their environmental interests that they have as a company – and that’s really important for us. Their shift towards being more environmentally conscious is one of the reasons why they wanted to be a part of this whole thing. MT: Are you limited in your service to the Pennsylvania region, or are you thinking of taking your services further afield? CK: A part of our growth strategy is to expand to other regions. We see a need and a direct use of our technology in Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region today, however, as we spoke earlier in this conversation, the western area of the United States is also in need of help with treating and cleaning up their contaminated water streams for reuse in industry. So as I see us today – we are rather focused on the Appalachian region, however, we’ve already been talking to folks out West on their needs as well. So I can see in the very near future, most likely within the next year, us pivoting and expanding our focus on the markets out West and, in fact, other areas of the globe.
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We have also been contacted by Norway. It’s another area where they have active mining sites, and even some closed mining sites where they are interested in applying our technology to clean up mining waters and reusing it in industrial applications. There are mining sites in Chile and other areas in South America as well, that are interested in what HydroFlex is doing here, in the Appalachian region. And finally, South Africa – we’ve been talking to some folks and an engineering firm there, on their gold mines that they have in the country and, again, they are doing a lot of active mining in that region, but they are also creating contaminated water streams that they’ve been holding and containing, but they want to have it cleaned up as well. So as I see us right now – we have been focused on the Appalachian, however in the very near term we are looking to expand into other areas of the United States and the globe. You can read more about Winner Water Service’s solutions – including white papers, written in collaboration with Battelle, on the company’s sulphate removal technology – on the Winner Water Services website. Published: 27th July, 2015
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