An overview on the progress in produced water desalination by membrane-based technology

The scarcity of clean water sources has become a global concern in the present-day society. This has driven to the extraction of fresh water from produced water (PW), from the oil and gas fields, specifically in countries experiencing freshwater shortage. Hence, utilization of membrane-based desalination technology to the treatment of produced water opens new avenues for water recovery. This review focuses on membrane-based processes for treating produced water from various sources in both stand-alone and hybrid systems. Nowadays, reverse osmosis (RO) technology has been widely used for treating PW, and at the same time emerging technologies, such as forward osmosis (FO), and membrane distillation (MD) are continuously advancing for the PW treatment process. Additionally, different pilot scale studies on the PW treatment carried out have been discussed in this work. Moreover, challenges of using the current membrane-based technologies for PW treatment have been analyzed in this study along with the future outlooks. It is anticipated that this review would provide benefits for the desalination scientific community to extract fresh water from PW using membrane-based technology. [Display omitted] •The PW desalination technique's effectiveness is more influenced by the membrane properties.•The most popular membrane-based PW desalination techniques are RO, FO, and MD.•Membranes fouling is a main membrane drawback in treating PW.•Membrane-hybrid processes have good potential in reducing membranes-based PW treatment challenges.