By Christine Pitcher
CSG – Formation water system to treat water to irrigation grade
Pump House Projects designed, constructed and commissioned the first and largest amended water treatment facility for CSG water in Australia reducing the environmental impacts of discharging saline water to the environment. This plant employed patented technology to efficiently manage the quality of discharged water to DERM/EPA standards.
The Pump House started business in 1987 and quickly grew to become the largest pump and irrigation specialist in South East Queensland.
In 2006, the company was asked to develop a water treatment system for a major coal seam gas company.
It took two years of hard work, countless hours of design and dozens of meetings before The Pump House secured its first contract in September 2008.
The production of Coal Seam Gas, produces large volumes of waste water. Beneficial use of CSG produced water to irrigate trees is an innovative Pump House Projects approach that addresses the twin problems of CSG waste water salinity and volume.
The system takes produced water from the gas extraction process and treats it to irrigation standard suitable for use on forestry timber and leucaena plantations.
A strategic alliance was formed between Pump House Projects (the industrial arm of The Pump House) and Tree Crop Technologies to work on the first project. Tree Crop Technologies and Pump House Projects combined expertise includes tree and fodder crop water chemistry, site and land assessment, soil science, crop and plantation design and establishment, irrigation design and construction, ongoing asset management and environmental monitoring.
Tree Crop Technology researched the benefits of CSG managed water irrigated plantations and discovered that the trees survive as CSG water flow declines and eventually stops altogether. The plantations are established as a long term commercial crop for either timber harvesting or carbon sequestration. The average carbon sequestered by the plantations over multiple harvesting cycles is available to offset emissions from other areas of customer operations.
Other benefits of using CSG water include:
- Scalable with the capacity to handle large and variable volumes of water
- Can be safely established close to the gas fields to reduce infrastructure costs
- Environmentally sustainable
- Highly cost-effective relative to other water management options
- Adaptive irrigation management balances environmental considerations such as plant health and soil integrity against variable CSG water flows and changing weather conditions
- Creates a carbon sink to reduce emission intensity
After several large scale applications of CSG water onto irrigated crops now completed, Pump House Projects can now offer this alternative to more capital intensive solutions such as Reverse Osmosis and the environmentally-compromised evaporation option.
The future for Pump House Projects
Pump House Projects is heavily involved in the design and construction of pump stations for municipal, construction and mining.
The company specialises in delivering turn-key water treatment projects and has successfully completed over 3000 water projects across a wide variety of corporate, government and private sectors.
Due to the expanding coal seam gas market Pump House Projects is constructing a purpose-built showroom and workshop in Chinchilla. It is the centre of the coal seam gas market and the company expects to be trading by early 2013.
Pump House Projects Head Office is based in Nambour. Peter Chadband, the Managing Director is a respected leader in the Pumping and Irrigation industry.
6 Pump VSD Pump, Control & Filtration system
Case study: Demountable Coal Seam Gas (CSG) Water Treatment Plants
With their ongoing development of CSG wells, a CSG producer required multiple treatment plants that could be integrated with existing operations and deployed into site specific areas
Solution
Pump House Projects developed two demountable water treatment plants processing CSG water for two geographically separate locations
Scope
Pump House Projects provided a full turn-key project solution, including design, fabrication and site installation. Pump House Projects provided all aspects of project management and technical support for integrating with existing operations
Project Size
Treating 2.1ML/day per plant; Project Value $5 million
Timing
7 months duration – delivered Feb 2011
Result
The two demountable CSG water plants were factory tested at Pump House Projects’ fabrication facilities in Nambour Queensland then successfully installed on site.
PHP team assembling ABS pipe with the previously butt-welded 400mm PE
in the background
