OriginOil Increases Electro Flotation Effectiveness More Than 50%

OriginOil, developer of Electro Water Separation, a high-speed, chemical-free process to clean up large quantities of water, says a breakthrough in electrode design for its second-stage electro flotation process increases extraction effectiveness by 54 percent over earlier plate designs, for the same amount of power consumption.

Dissolved air flotation is used in both oil and gas, and waste markets to extract suspended solids in very large installations. It plays in a sedimentation and centrifugation equipment market estimated to grow to more than $7 billion worldwide in 2015, according to a McIlvaine report.

Generating air bubbles at a large scale is relatively energy-intensive and requires the extensive use of chemicals. With its latest design, OriginOil says its EWS further increases the advantage of electro flotation over dissolved air flotation, while enabling retrofits into existing installations.

The new design optimizes the placement of electrodes within flotation tanks to lower energy consumption and improve particle recovery at higher flow rates. It increases effective contact area and improves the inter-electrode gap for increased bubble generation with the same power settings.

Tests published in July showed that energy usage with this technology can average 0.22 kWh per barrel of water processed, which amounts to about $0.03 per barrel at $0.15 per kWh.

Results from on-site testing of a pilot system in Colorado and Texas also demonstrated that water turbidity, suspended solids and oil in water were reduced by as much as 99 percent.