Holistic Planning Model for Sustainable Water Management in the Shale Gas Industry

Abstract

To address water planning decisions in shale gas operations, we present a novel water management optimization model that explicitly takes into account the effect of high concentrations of total dissolved solids (TDS) and temporal variations in the impaired water. The model comprises different water management strategies: (a) direct wastewater reuse, which is possible because of new additives tolerant to high TDS concentrations but at the expense of increasing the costs; (b) wastewater treatment, separately taking into account pretreatment, softening, and desalination technologies; and (c) the use of Class II disposal sites. The objective is to maximize the “sustainability profit” by determining the flowback destination (reuse, degree of treatment, or disposal), the fracturing schedule, the fracturing-fluid composition, and the number of water-storage tanks needed for each period of time. Because of the rigorous determination of TDS in all water streams, the model is a nonconvex MINLP model that is tackled in two steps: first, an MILP model is solved on the basis of McCormick relaxations; next, the binary variables that determine the fracturing schedule are fixed, and a smaller MINLP is solved. Finally, several case studies based on Marcellus Shale Play are optimized to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed formulation. The model identifies direct reuse as the best water-management option to improve both economic and environmental criteria.