SOCORRO, N.M. – Environmental Engineering professor Dr. Frank Huang has landed another $400,000 grant from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for a project to desalinate produced water.

The Bureau awarded $5.1 million to 30 projects this year. Huang’s project is one of only five projects that is in Phase II, which means the new technology is ready for field testing.

Huang – along with a host of students – has developed a system of forward osmosis to remove dissolved solids from water produced in the oil industry. With the Phase II funding, Huang’s team will deploy novel instrumentation at two locations – one in the Permian Basin in southeast New Mexico and the other at an oil field site in the Bakken Shale Play in North Dakota.

(Pictured are (from left) Dr. Frank Huang, Xavier Chavez, Suchinkumar Patel, Alexander Uc, Allie Arning, Hansen Dube, and Dumindu Premachandra.)

Huang has connected with industry partners in both locations. BC & D Operating Inc. is a privately-held oil and gas company in Hobbs. In North Dakota, Huang is working with EERC, in collaboration with Nuverra Environmental Solutions and the U.S. DOE National Energy Technology Laboratory. EERC has constructed a facility near Watford City, N.D., to pilot test water treatment technologies. Produced water generated from the Bakken Shale Play in North Dakota will be the source of brines at the facility.

Huang currently has two graduate students and two undergrads working on the project. He is seeking more students to join the project.

The goal of this Phase II project is to perform field testing of a thermally-regenerable pressure forward osmosis (T-PFO) process on concentrating highly saline produced water. Huang aims to develop a techno-economic model to assess the commercial viability of full-scale systems.

Last year, Huang landed a Bureau grant for $400,000 to deploy a membrane distillation water desalinization system with two industrial partners in southwest New Mexico. Since the inception of that project, Huang has employed more than a dozen students at NMT.

Huang initially received a five-year National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant for membrane research in 2013. That grant allowed him to establish infrastructures for the fabrication, characterization, and applications of membranes in water desalination and wastewater reuse.

That initial grant laid the groundwork for the two subsequent Phase II grants. He targeted two membrane processes – pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) and membrane distillation (MD). To get lab-scale results, he partnered with Apache Oil for produced-water energy generation and Masson Farms for brackish-water desalination.

– NMT –