airn India is part of the Vedanta Group, a globally diversified natural resources group with wide ranging interests in aluminium, copper, zinc, lead, silver, iron ore, etc.
Cairn India is one of the largest independent oil and gas exploration and production companies in India with a market capitalisation of ~ US$ 7 billion.
Cairn India operates ~27% of India’s domestic crude oil production. Through its affiliates, Cairn India has been operating for close to 20 years playing an active role in developing India’s oil and gas resources. To date, Cairn India has opened 4 frontier basins with numerous discoveries, 38 in Rajasthan alone.
The Mangala field in Rajasthan, discovered in January 2004, is the largest onshore oil discovery in India in more than two decades. Mangala, Bhagyam and Aishwariya fields – major discoveries in the Rajasthan block have gross ultimate oil recovery of over 1 billion barrels.
Cairn India has a portfolio of 9 blocks – one block in Rajasthan, which contains multiple assets, two on the west coast and four on the east coast of India and one each in Sri Lanka and South Africa. Oil and gas is currently being produced from Rajasthan, Ravva and Cambay.
While Exploration lot of Waste Water is generated which is contaminated with oil and minerals which cannot be thrown in the desert or river basins, this was a major issue and they needed an solution to it as it requires lot of thermal energy to evaporate it.
They had sought help of many Waste water evaporation consultants and contacted almost all manufacturers for an easier and cheaper solution and finally after various meetings and presentation it was decided to go in for a Solar based Waste Water Evaporation on pilot scale with Taylormade Renewables Ltd. (TRL)
The total requirement of Waste Water Evaporation is huge and every day thousands of Gallons of Waste Water is generated by oil drilling at Barmer site. At Present they have Solar Ponds to evaporate water. To expedite the water evaporation CARIN has decided to go in for such a Pilot Plant which can increase the Waste water evaporation.
The Waste water will be pumped on a Metal Open tray (painted with Marine paint) through a simple 0.5 H.P pump; from there it is falling on the Receiver by gravity. The receivers are heated by concentrating solar energy. The temperatures on the Receivers is more than 1000 degrees C.
The falling water on the receivers will start evaporating and the rest of the water which will not evaporate is heated up. The heated water is falling again in the nearby Solar Pond and the cycle will be repeated continuously.
To control the flow of water, a level indicator with a controller is installed, to make the process completely automatic.
To take this project as a Pilot study, it is agreed upon to install 8 parabolas of 32 M2 for evaporating 10,000 liters of waste water per day.
The project was successfully installed by Taylormade Renewables Ltd. and running without any problems for last six months. After this pilot project Cairn India is going in for bigger size projects with TRL as said to us by the Company (TRL)
The total cost of the system was Rs. 6,071,400.00 (Rs. Sixty Lacs, Seventy One Thousand and Four Hundred only). The MNRE Subsidy for the Project is 13,82,400.00 and UNDP support for the project was sanctioned 6.91 Lacs. The Project was taken up by UNDP under the Pilot Project scheme.