Driven by investor and public sentiment for quantifiable improvements in the energy sector, there has been step change in data transparency and reporting metrics for water usage. Operator Sustainability Reporting, state reporting requirements, and seismic response committees vary in intensity benchmarking. This session will serve to highlight water reporting case studies and best practices in industry on ESG reporting.

Reuse of produced water has been an increasingly common practice to support unconventional oil and gas development. Aside from the economic benefits associated with making use of the water produced as a byproduct of oil and gas operations, reusing also reduces both the need for sourcing water (brackish or fresh) from the environment and the volume of produced water that requires disposal. This session intends to discuss both the technological and regulatory evolutions that enable the reuse of produced water for unconventional development, along with the industry’s experiences, lessons learned and best practices.

Managing produced water rates and volume directly impacts the disposal/recycling cost and producer performance. The focus of this session is to discuss methodologies and strategies to reduced produced water volume and its impact on production sustainability and production operation cost management.

Opportunities for Beneficial Reuse within the oil and gas industry are generally centered around water flood and Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). While improvements can always be made, Best Practices in those areas are generally considered to be well established. On the other hand, Best Practices for beneficial reuse using produced water for applications outside of the industry are really in their infancy stage. This session aims to provide practical examples and tools including produced water characterization, how to design and execute a pilot study involving produced water, how to demonstrate Technical Readiness at various levels, how to carry out a credible Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA), and how to put together an upstream system based on holistic optimization.

Produced water streams are known to contain a wide range of minerals, from common minerals such as sodium, chloride, carbonates, to rare earth elements (REEs) and/or critical minerals (CMs), such as Lithium. While concentrations of common minerals can be high, other constituents tend to be low. But given the large volumes of produced water brought to the surface, as well as a growing need for produced water desalination that concentrates these minerals, REE/CM and common mineral recovery from treated produced water brines could become a reality for some basins or specific oil producing formations.

This session will address three goals: (1) provide an overview of recent technological developments and approaches in terms of mineral, REE, CM recovery from produced water, and (2) provide insights from upstream, midstream and service companies into the motivation, challenges, and economic incentives associated with mineral and REE/CM recovery from produced water at scale.

Across the Globe, efforts are underway to move to more carbon-neutral energy sources and to remove existing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through efforts such as carbon capture and underground sequestration (CCUS). This session seeks to explore the water requirements for those efforts from a quantity and quality standpoint and to determine if produced water could be used to offset freshwater needs especially in in areas historically prone to regional water stress. Regardless of the technology deployed, if produced water is used, it will be critical to remove hydrocarbons from the produced water prior to treatment and an excellent technology for that aspect will be addressed in this session as well.