De Pere, WI – The US Department of Energy has awarded CompRex a $148,810 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for a Phase I project to investigate the potential for a single-step energy efficient process to remove organic contaminants and inorganic solids from water that comes out of the fracking gas/oil wells.  

Hydraulic fracking wells use large amounts of high pressure water to extract oil and gases trapped in rocks.  Most of the water comes up the well head during drilling while other water trapped in the rocks also rise with the oils.  This large quantity of water contains contaminants from drilling additives and from the sediments that hold these oils. 

In this project, CompRex seeks to address this problem through an expanded application of its proprietary heat exchange reactor technology and will work with Virginia Commonwealth University to conduct testing of its technology at simulated conditions.

“CompRex is excited to receive the DOE grant to help us explore new applications of our core technology,” said Dr Zhijun Jia, CEO of CompRex, “Water is a precious resource that we must protect and manage, and CompRex’s reactor technology using near-supercritical water may be a good cost-effective way of reaching that goal.”

CompRex’s proposed technology features its core heat exchanger reactor and auxiliary equipment packed on a mobile skid. Utilizing the physical properties of water near its supercritical condition, CompRex’s solution would offer a much more effective way of treating fracking wastewater than conventional methods such as boiling, reverse osmosis, and other energy-intensive separation techniques. The compact size of CompRex’s reactor also allows the system to be feasible on a much smaller scale as a well-head solution for cleaning and recycling of fracking wastewater. For well-operators, this would create significant savings related to the cost for acquiring clean water and transporting wastewater to centralized treatment facilities. Another advantage of CompRex’s skid-mounted technology is its mobility. Multiple units can be deployed to a well, and as the amount of water produced starts to decrease, the skids can be deployed to other wells, giving great flexibility to well operators who may have hundreds of wells in a single site. 

About CompRex, LLC
Since its founding in 2014, CompRex, LLC has established itself as a leading supplier of highly advanced industrial heat exchangers and reactors for use under extreme conditions in applications such as power generation, petrochemical production, and waste treatment. Our products offer unparalleled performance, compact footprint, and significant cost savings, enabling us to win multi-million dollar projects alongside the likes of GE, Boeing, MIT, and UCLA. We are proudly based in America’s heartland, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where we have a state-of-the art in-house manufacturing facility, and with the support of our partners, we are able to design, engineer, and produce ASME-certified systems to our many customers.