Critical mineral source potential from oil & gas produced waters in the United States.

The volume of produced water, a by-product of oil & gas operations and other energy processes, has been growing across the United States (U.S.) along with the need to manage or recycle this wastewater.

Computational Screening of Physical Solvents for CO Pre-combustion Capture.

A computational scheme was used to screen physical solvents for CO pre-combustion capture by integrating the commercial NIST database, an in-house computational database, chem-informatics, and molecular modeling. A commercially available screened hydrophobic solvent, diethyl sebacate, was identified from the screening with favorable physical properties and promising absorption performance. The promising performance to use diethyl sebacate in CO pre-combustion capture has also been confirmed from experiments.

Cost Optimization of Osmotically Assisted Reverse Osmosis.

We develop a nonlinear optimization model to identify minimum cost designs for osmotically assisted reverse osmosis (OARO), a multistaged membrane-based process for desalinating high-salinity brines. The optimization model enables comprehensive evaluation of a complex process configuration and operational decision space that includes nonlinear process performance and implicit relationships among membrane stages, saline sweep cycles, and makeup, purge, and recycle streams. The objective function minimizes cost, rather than energy or capital expenditures, to accurately account for the trade-offs in capital and operational expenses inherent in multistaged membrane processes.