Researchers from the University of Texas El Paso use bacteriophages to clean and recycle wastewater produced by the fracking industry.
Researchers from the University of Texas El Paso use bacteria-infecting viruses to clean and recycle wastewater produced by the fracking industry.The Permian fracking industry in Texas produces about 168 billion gallons of wastewater a year. Globally, that number becomes increasingly high and disturbing: 359 billion cubic meters a year. So is the amount coming out of Texas.
Not only did the virus eradicate these bacteria quickly, but the treatment would even be cost-effective for this industry to use. They can even recycle the water. Sánchez and his team got the idea while working with the same treatment approach in the medical industry. They experimented with infecting treatment-resistant bacteria with a type of virus that infects bacteria known as bacteriophages.
There aren’t many bacteriophages available for commercial use, which poses a challenge. Bacteriophages also tend to be hyper-specifically matched to the type of bacteria that they infect, and the researchers don’t know how many types of bacteria are present in produced water yet.
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