Global challenges for the water industry in oil and gas production

This report reviews the oil and gas production industry with the purpose of describing the role of water in the production process. It is focused on water management, and water treatment for reuse/recycle or authorized emission to the environment.
This is a first among seven reports reviewing water in seven global industrial sectors.
Serving the goal to promote business opportunities for Israeli water companies, the purpose of this work is to enhance our understanding of the role of water in the industries of interest, and identify long term business challenges.
This work will be an important part of the infrastructure of Israel Newtech, IEICI and the Israeli consulate of economy affairs working plan for the next few years.
In this work we review water usage and treatment for each sector, and identify challenges that are a bottleneck for the growth of each specific sector.
We identified three major sectors within the oil and gas production: oil production, conventional gas production and shale gas production.
The first two refer to conventional production onshore and offshore.
Shale gas production is a recently vast growing sector, where its growth is limited by the intensive water consumption and environmental issues solutions.
It seems that the shale gas production holds the biggest potential for growth based on water innovative technologies, and therefore justifys large Israeli industrial effort.