Vapor Trails

CustomerAticline Disposal

LocationDaniel, WY

SituationRapid development of natural gas extraction in Wyoming’s Green River Basin have caused water treatment demands to skyrocket. Despite building new, larger reservoirs and adding more sprinkler heads, the evaporation system at Anticline Disposal just couldn’t keep up with customer needs.

Featured Products SMI turnkey automated evaporation system:• 8 Super Polecat Evaporators• Four SMI 320 Evaporators• One SMI 420 Evaporator• Four weather stations• Programmable Logic Controllers• Central processor to control pumps and modulate flow• Data collection system• All piping, controls & valves• Software, programming & startup

ResultsIn the first phase of the expansion, SMI engineers installed high-performance evaporators and piping to drastically expand the facility’s capacity. Phase two added exten-sive automation that addressed environmental concerns about overspray. Anticline Disposal now operates with full automation of pumps and evaporators, employee-ing a CPU that tracks wind speed and direction, temperature and humidity to maximize evaporation efficiency and ensure that overspray is returned to the holding cells.

High-performance evaporators and automation boost capacity of water disposal facility State of the art automation is the key to precise control of a high-performance evaporation system at Anticline Disposal (Daniel, WY), allowing the facility to evaporate as much as 13,800 barrels per day of non-hazardous production water from drilling in Wyoming’s Green River Basin. To maximize efficiency and spray control, the Anticline operation is equipped with SMI’s state-of-the-art automation software called SmartH2OTM -- which constantly monitors wind and weather data to optimize water delivery and spray patterns.

Four weather stations detect temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, feeding the data to a central processor. Using programmable logic controllers, the CPU operates submersed pumps in a series of four holding pits at the 40-acre site, with a total capacity of 3.8 million barrels. The weather data is also used to individually control thirteen evaporators, modulating droplet size for optimum hang time, while ensuring that overspray falls back into the holding ponds.

Natural gas operations have grown exponentially in Wyoming, largely a function of new technologies for economical extraction. The Greater Green River Basin has a long history of energy exploration and production, with more than seven trillion cubic feet of gas produced since the first discoveries in 1922. Today the area is attracting considerable attention as one of the nation's most important producers of natural gas. The corresponding demand for waste water treat-ment has mushroomed to hundreds of millions of barrels annually, and local disposal facilities have been hard pressed to keep pace.

“When we first opened in 2002, we started with sprinklers on floating dikes,” said John James, General Manager at Anticline. “We had two pits at the time, which held 1/4 million barrels of water each.”

It quickly became apparent, however, that the demand was far outstripping capacity. “In this area, for every million cubic feet of natural gas extracted, the process creates about ten barrels of non-hazardous water,” James explained. “At the rate things were going, our pits were filling faster than we could evaporate from them.”

Management at Anticline applied for permits to construct a third holding cell, which opened in 2004 with a capacity of nearly 2 million barrels. At about the same time, engineers installed the first of thirteen evaporation machines from SMI, designed to dramatically increase the facility’s capacity.

Anticline Disposal accepts non-hazardous waste water from natural gas production in Wyoming’s Green River Basin.