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Produced Water as New Water in the Hydrocarbon Industry

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Clean Water and Sanitation

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals ((ENUNSDG))

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New water is not a precise term and is used here to indicate the positive potential use and reuse of produced water (PW) as a new source in water supply. PW is a generic term describing water produced during oil and gas operations by different methods and at different qualities. It encompasses water naturally available in the formations (formation water), injected into them (e.g., flowback or frac water), produced from adjacent layers, or otherwise used to extract oil and gas. PW has different oil, organic, solids, chemical, or radioactive components and it can thus be characterized as brine, saltwater etc. (Hagström et al. 2018; Al-Ghouti et al. 2019). Often, due to different states and forms of production, other terms are used to describe such water associated with oil and gas production, e.g., coproduce water (co-PW) and flowback water (Guerra et al. 2011; William and Simmons 2013). Flowback water is the water injected into wells to create cracks in the source rock...

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Correspondence to Mohammad Al-Saidi .

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Al-Saidi, M. (2021). Produced Water as New Water in the Hydrocarbon Industry. In: Leal Filho, W., Azul, A.M., Brandli, L., Lange Salvia, A., Wall, T. (eds) Clean Water and Sanitation. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70061-8_47-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70061-8_47-1

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