The Global Water Sustainability Center
ConocoPhillips’ Global Water Sustainability Center (GWSC) opened in early 2009 with the mission of examining methods to treat and reuse byproduct water from oil production and refining operations, and conducting other projects relating to industrial and municipal water sustainability. The center is located in the Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP) in Doha, a unique facility in which a cluster of premier companies works under one roof to research critical local and global issues. The close proximity of the Qatar Foundation’s Education City provides opportunities for QSTP tenants to collaborate with top scientists who have access to facilities and to employ graduates from world-class universities.

ConocoPhillips aims to develop innovative, efficient and cost-effective technologies to treat byproduct water for potential use in applications such as crop irrigation, livestock watering, wildlife habitats, or industrial cooling and recycling. Use of byproduct water for these purposes could leave more fresh water available for domestic use. ConocoPhillips intends for the facility to become a center of excellence for key water-related technologies in the petroleum and water industries.

Scope of Work
The Global Water Sustainability Center focuses on various desalination processes, in addition to removal of heavy metals and hydrocarbons. It also evaluates cost-effective ways to recycle municipal water for irrigation purposes. Increased emphasis is directed toward advanced technologies, with particular emphasis placed on membrane processes.

Approximately 75 percent of the center’s projects focus on global water issues related to the petroleum and petrochemical sector, and 25 percent focus on local water conservation and municipal issues for the state of Qatar. Each project addresses one or more of the following issues:

• Reducing freshwater consumption
• Lowering water-related operational costs
• Minimizing environmental impacts of water discharge

The Facility
The Global Water Sustainability Center includes a visitor center, offices, state-of-the-art analytical laboratories, and advanced bench-scale testing equipment.  Engineers, scientists and technicians conduct research at the center.  Support in the form of pilot testing will be conducted at ConocoPhillips’ global operational facilities or at local water treatment plants.

Community Awareness and Visitor Center
A key goal of the GWSC is to increase awareness of the importance of water conservation within Qatar. The facility’s visitor center has three objectives: education and training, knowledge sharing and public outreach. Various workshops are offered on key issues for water-scarce regions, such as water conservation and municipal water recycling. The visitor center includes interactive, hands-on exhibits to educate local school children and other public visitors about water conservation.

CTour®
Our Norway business unit has developed extensive experience in technologies for handling produced water in order to meet stringent regulations in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea. At the Ekofisk field, we have invested $84 million in a produced water handling plant to comply with the government’s goal of zero harmful emissions and discharges to the sea.

In addition to reinjecting produced water back into the Ekofisk reservoir, excess produced water is cleaned using the CTour® purification process, which removes hydrocarbons by injecting natural gas liquids (NGL) into the produced water. The hydrocarbon components present in the water attach to the NGL and are then extracted. CTour® is designed to return more than 99 percent of the NGL to the Ekofisk production stream, while enabling the discharge of purified water into the sea. The treatment has reduced the hydrocarbon components in the water from 30 parts per million (PPM) to only around 5 PPM, a substantial improvement in quality compared to that attainable with other technologies. The treatment works by removing polyaromatic hydrocarbons and alkylated phenols, as well as oil-soluble production chemicals. CTour® has been in successful operation since December 2008.

Total reinjection of produced water was technically feasible, but it could have created a high risk of reservoir destruction and loss of reserves. The CTour® process involved no risk to the Ekofisk reservoir and offered high cleaning efficiency at reasonable cost.