Armada Water

Armada Water is a fully integrated service company dedicated to the safe and cost-effective collection, handling, transport, treatment and reuse of contaminated water. It has developed solutions for contaminated water produced by oil and gas production and hydraulic fracturing flow-back water.

“There is an ongoing need for appropriate water treatment solutions in the oil and gas industry because fundamentally the industry produces more water than it does oil. And with water being viewed as a valued resource, the drivers are in place for a new source of water,” Vice President of Innovation and Engineering Dr. Oliver Laurence says. “We have looked at ways that we could service the needs of the oil and gas companies by taking a waste stream and making it a valuable product stream.”

Treatment Solutions
The company offers a unique, flexible and innovative approach to water treatment, focusing on delivering significant benefits to customers. Through its innovative approaches, Armada provides clients with the ability to convert production water into an incremental fresh water source – with up to a 90 percent yield – and enables efficient local reuse of water for multiple applications.

Armada offers services such as logistics, raw water sales, infield water management and water treatment capabilities that allow water to be recycled and repurposed instead of reused. The company has evolved through select acquisition of separate component parts or product lines, which it is joining together to provide an integrated solution to the industry.

“We take existing methodologies and apply our application engineering expertise to take those existing off-the-shelf technologies and draw them together to create a cost-effective and practical process that can be implemented in the field,” Laurence says.

Armada provides technology and resources to deliver self-contained resource-recycling systems that reduce overall trucking costs and decrease carbon emissions associated with conventional processes. The company is focused on two different water domains within the oil and gas industry: the produced water market and the frack fluid flow-back market.

“We are competing on the basis of our technical ability to be able to cost-effectively transform the water and make it a product stream and satisfy the commercial drivers in place,” Laurence says. “We are working mostly with smaller, independent oil and gas companies. We understand what their needs are in terms of liquid water. We look at the volume of produced and flow-back water, and we then figure out what we can do to treat it. After that, we can set up a short-term evaluation and demonstrate what we can do and scale up from there.”

Headquartered in Houston, the company also has offices in Odessa, Texas, and in Grand Junction and Greely, Colorado. In addition, the company has a water treatment facility in Utah just over the Colorado state line that can treat 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) per day of produced and flow-back water. Armada can also inject contaminated water that cannot be economically treated back into the subsurface via the company’s disposal wells.

“We can take water in and we can clean it,” Laurence says. “And what can’t be cleaned and repurposed, will go back into the ground where it came from, through disposal wells. We offer trucking services and field-based water management and treatment, and we are developing mobile treatment solutions to deploy in the field in the short term. These mobile units will be capable of treating 5,000 bbls per day and can be set up as a self contained mobile treatment train.”

Making the Case
During the coming year, Armada will be concentrating on demonstrating the capabilities of its solutions and showing operators that it can help them save money by finding ways to use their assets in more efficient ways. Given the radical shift in commodity prices taking place in the industry, Armada believes that now is the time for oil and gas companies to home in on efficiency of processes and increasing productivity to stay competitive.

“Unconventional oil and gas reserves will be there and will require a sustained, elevated oil price, which will come back,” Laurence says.

In the meantime, Armada will continue to refine its own processes, from hiring and training to assuring that its solutions continue to evolve and can be scaled up rapidly. It will put itself in position to capitalize on future growth opportunities. “People, technology and opportunity must be married together,” Laurence says. “We must continue to get our people and applications ready so we can deliver our services to market.”