【Ten Years of Rapid Development in Chemical Equipment】Tests for lithium extraction and hydrogen production from the produced water of China’s largest ultra-deep condensate gas field completed between 2023 and 2025

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Let’s give praise and support to the achievements made in China’s chemical engineering technology and equipment; your participation in discussions is the greatest encouragement. **********************【Ten Years of Progress in Chemical Engineering Equipment】Regular updates and summaries are available; feel free to join the discussions: https://bbs.hcbbs.com/thread-3576046-1-1.html ***************** Testing for lithium and hydrogen production from produced water from China’s largest ultra-deep condensate gas field has been completed. 2025-05-09 13:24:06 On May 8th, Bozi-Dabei Gas Field, China’s largest ultra-deep condensate gas development site, successfully completed a 22-day experiment on producing hydrogen through the electrolysis of produced water. Through technological innovation, the Tarim Oilfield of China Petroleum has overcome the technical challenges related to the treatment of oil and gas field produced water. The Bozi-Dabei gas field is another gas field of the trillion cubic meter class discovered in the Tarim Oil Field, following the Kela-Keshen gas field; it is also one of the main sources of gas for the West-East Gas Pipeline Project and the pipeline networks serving southern Xinjiang. In recent years, as gas fields have seen rapid production increases, the volume of water produced has risen significantly, reaching 3,700 cubic meters per day. The traditional water treatment method of \"gravity settling + oil removal + reinjection\" can no longer meet the requirements for environmental protection. The experiment project on lithium extraction and hydrogen production from produced water involves feeding the highly polluted wastewater generated during oil and gas extraction into specific electrolyzers to carry out chemical reactions, thereby producing hydrogen that can be used in modern industry or as a fuel. At the same time, the brine extracted is concentrated during the electrolysis process, increasing the lithium concentration; subsequently, through lithium extraction processes, the core material for new energy batteries is produced. In November 2024, the Tarim Oilfield’s Tasixi South Exploration and Development Company collaborated with Southwest Petroleum University to carry out research on the electrolytic production of hydrogen and lithium extraction from gas field produced water, thereby providing technical foundations for projects such as the use of photovoltaic green energy for hydrogen production and lithium extraction, as well as the synthesis of methanol from carbon dioxide. In February this year, the team conducted water quality analyses and laboratory-scale hydrogen production tests at the Bozi-Dabei gas field, preliminarily confirming that the water extracted from the field could be directly fed into electrolyzers to produce hydrogen after simple flocculation and sedimentation. The lithium extraction and hydrogen production test project adopted a \"intermittent cycling + continuous operation\" mode to conduct industrial-scale tests of the entire process flow. In the experiment, the characteristics of photovoltaic power generation were simulated through electrical input; the electrolysis system operated for 6 to 10 hours per day during daylight hours, successfully achieving the coupling of water purification and hydrogen production. It is reported that since the hydrogen production test using the electrolysis system was initiated at the Daubei treatment plant on April 15, the test project has been operating in extreme conditions such as sandstorms for 22 days, producing a total of about 236 standard cubic meters of hydrogen.