New process could recover billions of gallons of oil refinery wastewater

Every day in the United States, about 2.5 billion gallons of produced water – a  byproduct of oil refinery and extraction – is generated as waste. This water is deemed unusable for household and commercial use by the Environmental Protection Agency due to the many remaining contaminants. And while several commercial treatments are available to clean this water, they can be expensive, energy-intensive, and do not remove all traces of contaminants from the water. But in what could be a major development for the oil refinery …