WATER injected at high pressure into rock deep underground during the process of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, often returns to the surface as brine, having picked up a lot of salt on its journey. It is also contaminated with chemicals from the fracking process itself. So a cheap and effective way of separating the salt and other chemicals from the water would be welcome. General Electric (GE), an American engineering conglomerate, is now putting one through its paces.
The system in question, developed by a firm called Memsys Clearwater, which is based in Germany and Singapore, is called vacuum multi-effect membrane distillation. It combines the two established ways of desalinating water: distillation and membrane separation. Already used to produce drinking water from seawater, it has not previously been applied to cleaning up water used in fracking. But recent trials of the system at a gas-fracking plant in Texas have been encouraging.
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