A Class I Injection Well. Image credit: Ohio EPA

One company has set out to lead the wastewater disposal industry with its trade secret evaporation method.

When it comes to wastewater disposal, is there a safer and more environmentally-friendly alternative to injection wells?

Injection wells, devices that place water, wastewater, brine or any other kind of water that may be mixed with chemicals underground into rock formations, have been used since the 1930s as a way of disposing unwanted brine and preserving surface waters, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Years later, many chemical companies began injecting industrial waste into deep wells, sparking a heightened increase in deep injection methods, which at the time proved to be safe, and even today continues to remain an inexpensive waste disposal method.

This method has incited concern from various environmental groups over the years. There’s fear that liquid waste will migrate throughout the Earth or that the acts will spark earthquakes (though earthquakes occurred long before injection wells were developed).

So, what kinds of alternatives exist to this very traditional method?

One chemical engineer, Anthony Migyanka, founder and CEO of CLLEEN Water and Power, which deals with mobile and stationary units for desalination, active and abandoned mine drainage (AMD) and frack water treatment, got started in the industry by chance (“it was my last opportunity to get a co-op job as a chemical engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh,”) and refers to wastewater as the “12 trillion dollar industry that nobody knows about.” (A personal calculation of Migyanka’s that combines all aspects of the industry.)

Migyanka founded the company after recognizing the growing demand for water treatment.

“I realized there was a huge gap in the industry for water disposal,” he says.

What started out as a company that would conduct some recycling and potential evaporation, became one focused more on simply evaporation techniques for wastewater disposal, a process that is actually in high-demand.

The main industries that will benefit from the technology are oil and gas, landfills and mine tailings dams.

How It Works

The company simply evaporates water—a task that nearly anyone can carry out if they heat up some H20. However, this entails a bit more science than you may have thought. “You have heard the expression 'as easy as boiling water,' but the equations for the evaporation of water droplets is the hardest math I have ever seen,” says Migyanka.

The energy-saving process involves increasing the surface areas of water that can be contacted. CLEEEN’s Multi-Stage Flash Technology allows for water distillation in two stages. First, the feed water is made into droplets, then it is heated and flashed in CLLEEN’s proprietary chamber.

The CLLEEN system uses an electric heater in the chamber, which heats an air stream that contacts the water droplets, and therefore is a more energy-efficient means of evaporation. This CLLEEN VAP method can even evaporate the water down to dry salts (a term called crystallization), and therefore makes no liquid brine, so it needs no additional treatment nor injection well disposal.

According to the company, the CLLEEN process can convert at least 70 percent (by volume) of the high-TDS water to potable (less than 10 ppm TDS) versus 40-50 percent conversion (by volume) for reverse osmosis, but their focus for the foreseeable future is their 24-foot CLLEEN MOBILE VAP trailers, towed by a pickup truck, simply evaporating the water as an environmentally-friendly disposal method, without any liquid water recovery. The process does not use chemicals, filters, floc tanks or require backwashing, so maintenance is reduced for customers. The salts can then be re-wasted onto the landfill, mine tailings dams or in the case of oil and gas produced water, the salts can be used as road salt for de-icing (for the states that currently permit it) or simply hauled to a non-hazardous landfill.

Migyanka admits, “It’s not a perfect solution,” but after 25 years as an engineer, he’s discovered there truly is no perfect solution to a problem.

It may not be perfect, but the method does evaporate large volumes of water at the well site, at about half the cost of transporting water to an injection well, which therefore also reduces the carbon footprint of disposal costs. “One of our 24-foot trailers can treat the water that would require 30 brine hauling trucks (3,400 barrels) per day,” Migyanka says, which reduces the carbon footprint at the well as well as the road damage done by those large brine hauling tankers.

Currently, there’s no real competition for CLLEEN’s services, as it is not yet a mature market. The real competition lies with injection wells, which have always proven more cost-effective.

However, according to Migyanka, there have been more than 1.1 million wells fracked in the U.S. and Canada. To take that water and put all of it into injection wells would be too much. The Earth could potentially be affected by this method.

CLLEEN’s evaporation method, however, is safer and requires no injection at all.

The solution can be used in a plethora of other applications such as sea water desalination. Currently, multi-flash distillation is still the largest used method and typically done within desalination plants worldwide, despite the increasing growth of reverse osmosis.

In addition, Migyanka says that eventually the method could be implemented in killing bacteria for sewage recycle, as well as a zero liquid discharge (ZLD) solution for newly-constructed power plants.

Once the water is discharged from the method, it can be used on almost anything. With just a little more treatment, it could even be used for drinking.

“Mother Nature has forced our hand,” says Migyanka. Thanks to the evaporation method, the world is now presented with additional methods to produce clean water.

“You have to drink water every three days or you die, so, yeah, water is really important,” he adds wryly.

Not only does the method provide an environmentally-friendly alternative to injection wells, but it can also provide additional clean water, a clearly important aspect of life as we know it.