Vapor Trails

Vapor Trails
High-performance evaporators and automation
boost capacity of water disposal facility
Customer
Aticline Disposal
Location
Daniel, WY
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.
Situation
Rapid 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
Results
In the first phase of the expansion,
SMI engineers installed highperformance evaporators and piping
to drastically expand the facility’s
capacity. Phase two added extensive automation that addressed
environmental concerns about
overspray. Anticline Disposal now
operates with full automation of
pumps and evaporators, employeeing 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.
Anticline Disposal accepts non-hazardous waste
water from natural gas production in Wyoming’s
Green River Basin.
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 treatment 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.