Occurrence and behaviour of colloidal silica and silica-rich nanoparticles through stages of reverse osmosis treating coal seam gas associated water

Reverse Osmosis (RO) membrane filtration is a very common process for treating a wide range of groundwater types including produced water from coal seam gas (coalbed methane) wells. Mineral scaling limits water recovery for RO membranes and costs money in terms of treatment and downtime. Silica scaling can be particularly troublesome as it is often irreversible. Mitigating silica scaling requires an understanding of its occurrence, speciation mechanism and its interdependency with other operation factors. This study uses a range of techniques to show that silica colloids form during later stages of an RO process with very high recovery. This happens at silica concentrations above the solubility that would normally indicate high risk of silica scale. However, instead of scale, colloids preferentially formed which means the process can operate at high recoveries with RO performance maintained by regular cleaning cycles. The concentration of the colloidal silica through the RO stages was measured through the difference in total and dissolved silica. Once the existence was established with this technique, the particles were trapped and their size, morphology and composition were investigated with Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) in conjunction with Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (EDS). This revealed the particles to be predominantly silica with limited other elements involved.