Alderley is probably best known for providing high accuracy hydrocarbon measurement systems to the oil, gas and petrochemical industries. Since the late 1990’s and complementing our metering business Alderley has been developing systems for the produced water treatment market which was identified as lacking the solutions capable of meeting the future requirements, such as oil-in-water discharge reductions and total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) removal.

This year alone, Alderley has sold in excess of $50 million of produced water treatment equipment from our extensive product portfolio, a figure which could very well make us the world’s largest provider. This growth has arisen from the flexibility of solutions offered, having identified early that the conventional liquid-liquid hydrocyclone is no longer suitable on its own for new developments and upgrades.

Packages are being engineered incorporating the latest treatment technologies from our portfolio; coalescing filters (the COP System), absorption filters (RM-25), polishing filters (Nutshell), compact flotation units (CFU), induced gas flotation units, complemented by the conventional deoiling hydrocyclones, desanding hydrocyclones, flotation vessels and sand cleaning systems.

One of our most prestigious projects is large produced water guard filter system which will be used at a major onshore treatment plant to treat up to 13,000 tonnes of produced water a day, whilst guaranteeing that the oil concentration (TPH) at the package outlet does not exceed 10mg/l. The package uses 35m3 of RM-25 absorption media which makes it the largest single application of this type anywhere in the world. The RM-25 system is based on a surfactant coated media granule with a higher percentage active ingredient than any other absorbent media making it ideal for the removal of dissolved and emulsified hydrocarbons from produced water. The absorption filter systems can be engineered to guarantee oil in water concentrations below 5mg/l where required and in many cases will achieve results as low as 0.5mg/l.

On another major project, for a large Russian oilfield development, we are using a combination of deoiling and desanding hydrocyclones, polishing filters, and induced gas flotation vessels to remove solids down to 30 microns and reduce the oil in water concentration at the package outlets to below 15mg/l on up to 180,000 tonnes of produced water a day.

Alderley can provide a pilot unit to demonstrate the effectiveness of our Produced Water Treatment technologies.