Froth flotation as primary treatment of flowback water: Removal of total organic carbon and prediction of kinetics

Petroleum and exploration industries employ a hydrofracking process where a large volume of water (fracturing fluid) is injected and a fraction (known as flowback water) is returned to the surface. Froth flotation is a typical process employed for the primary treatment of water. In the present work, froth flotation has been used as a pretreatment method for real flowback water sourced from the petroleum and shale gas exploration industry. In the present work, a first-principle based convective mass transfer model has been developed to describe the froth flotation performance. The resultant equation was solved analytically and compared with the numerical solution, and a parametric sensitivity analysis of the process performance was also undertaken. In addition, a correlation to estimate the flotation rate constant was proposed, thereby circumventing the need to obtain a large number of cumbersome parameters experimentally. Overall, this study proposes froth flotation as an efficient primary treatment method towards the separation of dispersed oil droplets from the flowback water and the corresponding prediction of kinetics using a first-principle based transport model.