Development of Cordierite Honeycomb Membrane Filters for Produced Water Treatment

Oil and gas exploration and production processes produce large volume of waste as produced water that needs to be treated before reuse or discharge due to fresh water scarcity and upcoming tighter regulation. In this talk, we will present Corning’s effort to develop chemically durable cordierite honeycomb microfiltration membranes for oil-water filtration. Two types of cordierite membrane have been developed with the pore size of 0.2 and 0.5 micron, respectively. The clean water permeance is in the range of 1500-2000 L/m2/h/bar. The chemical durability test demonstrated that they are durable in the solutions from pH3 to pH13 at the temperature up to 80 degree C. The oil-water filtration performance will be discussed.