August 05, 2024
A Water Transfer Automation Success Story: High-Tech Monitoring, No Spills or Overflows, One Employee
Historically, unconventional oil and gas extraction has relied on a large workforce and a fleet of trucks to transfer produced water from individual pad site to storage, disposal, or the next frac. While effective, it has drawbacks – inefficiency, high labor costs, and risk to worker safety and to the environment from spills or overflows. Keystone Clearwater Solutions provides proprietary water transfer automation solutions that maximize efficiency, safety, and protection of the environment and are cost-effective.
Outthinking our competition: Temporary water transfer automation on a permanent installation
The advantage of Keystone Clearwater’s WaterForce® automation is the ability to create a customized solution that is flexible and easily scalable to suit changing needs. For one client, a temporary water transfer automation was designed to transfer produced water from water storage tanks on pad to a centralized storage facility off-site.
Prior to implementing the WaterForce automation, multiple employees were required to run the pumps to transfer water to the storage facility. The process could take an hour to several hours and required communication between the customer and our employees and between multiple sites that needed to pump water.
Keystone Clearwater designed a solution that transferred water from six permanent production tanks to six temporary tanks as buffer storage before piping to the centralized storage facility. The system uses standard WaterForce hardware components with customized programming. By using our standard parts and programming expertise from existing system, we created a system that was cost effective and safer to operate. The system consists of our automated pump controller skids, automated valves, float switches, flowmeters, and pressure sensors. WaterForce also integrated with the customer’s level sensors to reduce cost by not needing to add our own sensors for each tank.
Benefits of water transfer automation
- Efficient and reliable – 24/7 monitoring with text and email alerts if issues arise
- Scalable to meet changing needs and additional locations
- Customized using standard components, maximizes flexibility and cost-effectiveness
- Safety – fewer workers on site, fewer vehicles on the road
- Reduction of labor costs – one employee can oversee the entire process from a command trailer
- Reliability of automated system to prevent spills or line overpressures using interlock to close valves and turn off pumps
Since 2009, Keystone Clearwater Solutions has provided proprietary water transfer and management solutions for the oil and gas industry. With an experienced workforce of more than 700 and a full range of equipment and services, we serve the Mid-Atlantic region and Texas.
Keystone Clearwater Solutions companies include strategic partner Hydro Recovery LP, our FieldForce Equipment Sales, Services, & Rental division, and strategic partner, Coral Reef Partners solar solutions.
