Please join us as we start the new year with Rick McCurdy, Vice President of Innovation and Sustainability for Select Water Solutions who will be presenting "The Hydrogen Economy and What Role Produced Water May Play".

Hydrogen has long been touted as a green energy source as the only emission produced when combusted in an internal combustion engine (or reacted in a fuel cell) is water vapor. Regardless of this fact, the cost to produce hydrogen is considerably higher than the cost to produce either gasoline or diesel and this has prevented widespread hydrogen adoption in the U.S. To incentivize interest in hydrogen production, the Inflation Reduction Act includes significant credits for producing hydrogen particularly if the production method does not allow carbon dioxide to escape to the atmosphere. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Energy recently awarded several billion dollars to a number of regional hydrogen research hubs with the goal being to greatly reduce the cost to produce hydrogen. As many of the methods used to produce hydrogen are very water intensive, this talk will look at the water demands of a hydrogen economy and the potential to use produced water in place of fresh water in the various processes.

Bio

Rick is Vice President of Innovation and Sustainability for Select Water Solutions, a US-based service provider active in the water sourcing, treatment, reuse and chemical application spaces. In this role, Rick is focused on minimizing fresh water use and evaluating technologies that may lead to beneficial use of a treated produced water in the future. As such, he is an active participant in the produced water consortiums underway in New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado. Prior to Select, Rick served as a Sr. Engineering Advisor for Chesapeake Energy, where he was a primary developer of Chesapeake’s initiative championing the use of produced water in oil & gas operations– AquaRenew® and the industry-leading GreenFrac® program that focused on environmentally friendly hydraulic fracturing additives. Rick served as a technical expert during the US EPA study of the potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing on water resources and has presented to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Energy, and the Energy Information Agency regarding water use in the Energy Sector. Rick has an AAS degree in Petroleum Technology.