Zara Khatib's quest to save precious water

For Zara Khatib, the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon in 1975 posed a dilemma. She dreamed of becoming a chemical engineer. Yet she knew that if she stayed with her family in the city where she had grown up the conflict would disrupt her university education and her hopes could be dashed. If she left for London to continue her studies, she could not be certain she would see her homeland again.

The deciding factor was her mother’s encouragement to pursue education as far as possible. “I wasn’t going to see my chances of achieving what I wanted being ruined by war,” says Khatib. “So I left, although it was not an easy choice.”

The decision proved right. For the next two years her mother, a volunteer nurse, and one of her sisters, a student, lived mostly in a science lab at the American University in West Beirut. Shelling and snipers made their journey home too terrifying. Fortunately they survived and, with war still raging, they eventually left Beirut to reunite with Khatib.

By that time she was a visiting lecturer in chemical engineering at the University of Houston, Texas. She held a chemistry degree from the American University of Beirut and a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Wales in Swansea. She had also held a research post at Imperial College, London. In Houston, she impressed a Shell scientist with a lecture on the separation of fluids from soil and minerals displaced by drilling oil wells, leading to a job with the company in 1984 as a reservoir engineer. It was a fateful turning point in a remarkable career during which she has helped revolutionise the way the oil industry uses a valuable resource: water.

The oil industry produces three times as much water as it does oil, since water always sits beneath or within a reservoir – sometimes both – and flows with the oil as it’s pumped to the surface. The industry also uses large quantities of water to help boost production – either as steam injected into the reservoir to heat the oil and ease it out, or by flooding the reservoir with water to force out the oil. Khatib’s special brief was to study the effects of injected water on rock formations to avoid problems that could hamper oil production.

Before joining Shell, Khatib had already shown a flair for innovation with two patented inventions – a rotating kiln for the aluminum industry that improved the separation of the aluminum from the raw material bauxite and a new filtration system that improved the separation of oil from water.

Today, Khatib is recognised as one of the energy industry’s leading experts on water use. She has sat on an advisory committee for the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, and has acted as an advisor on the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on water to the G8 and the World Energy Council. During more than 20 years at Shell she has helped transform the industry view of water produced with oil, according to her peers. Once perceived as a waste product that costs money to treat and dispose of, it is now seen as a resource that can reduce the amount of fresh water the industry consumes.

Although she was not involved in the project, Khatib points to a Shell joint venture in the Middle East that used to take all its water from the Euphrates. “It now uses around a third less and makes up the rest with recycled water,” she says.

Through her work, Khatib has come to believe that the availability of water for drinking and for agriculture could become as urgent a problem as dealing with greenhouse gases. With droughts and unpredictable floods already affecting food and water supplies in some parts of the world, she sees the issue of water resources closely tied to climate change.

Water stress

The World Bank estimates that around 700 million people live in areas with insufficient water. By 2035, it says, around three billion people could be living under what it calls “severe water stress”. The world has plenty of water, but only 2.5% is fresh. And only 3% of salt water can be currently converted into drinking water in desalination plants because they are costly and use a lot of energy. Population growth and economic development add to pressures on water resources in addition to industry’s consumption of vast amounts of water for processes like steam generation or cooling.

The oil industry is in a unique position to influence water resources, says Khatib. As an oil field ages the amount of water produced with the oil increases – in some cases less than 15% of the liquid pumped out of the ground is oil. So while the oil industry consumes fresh water, it also produces a lot of water that can be recycled. Khatib believes recycling this water can help efforts to preserve water resources. “There are alternatives to fossil-fuel energy, but there are no alternatives to fresh water,” she says.

Changing minds

During the 1990s Khatib promoted her views on water at international industry conferences through her roles in organisations like the Society of Petroleum Engineers and the Petroleum Environmental Research Forum. As environmental concerns increased and the costs rose of treating water to be discharged safely into seas and rivers, colleagues paid closer attention.

“She was instrumental in changing the way our industry looked at water,” says Emmanuel Garland, Head of Regulations in Total’s health, safety, security and environment department and one of the company’s leading water experts.  “She didn’t just listen to what others had to say at these conferences. She would pursue them afterwards to get more detail and continue the discussion.”

Her tenacity was also evident at an industry conference in Aberdeen, Scotland, several years ago. John Veil, Manager of the Water Policy Program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Washington, DC, describes Khatib as “one of the industry’s leaders in water management”. But he admits he was a little taken aback by his experience.

“Most of the speakers were given 30 minutes but because I’d been invited over by the sponsors I was given 45,” he recalls. “Zara was the chairperson for the session. But perhaps she was unaware of my extra time, because with still a few minutes to go even before 30 minutes was up she began making gestures and telling me from the side of the stage to wrap it up. I tried to carry on but in the end she persisted and I had to give up and hand over.”

Khatib moved to the Netherlands in 1999 and was later appointed to run a Shell team charged with improving the company’s water and reservoir management for treatment, injection and re-use of water. She and her team worked on research and development projects and were called in as troubleshooters to fields that hit water problems in the North Sea, the USA, the Gulf of Mexico, Nigeria and the Middle East.

She also encouraged other oil companies to develop jointly ways of meeting ever-more stringent environmental standards. “She pushed us to meet and share knowledge on the subject regularly,” says Per Grini, Chief Researcher Upstream Process and Flow Assurance Technology at Norwegian energy firm StatoilHydro. “She has a rare combination of being extremely demanding and professional in her approach, but with the charisma that makes people want to go along with her.”

Finding solutions

Khatib’s inventiveness has spawned a series of simple but effective solutions to problems in oil production. In 1994, for example, Shell’s Auger platform was in danger of discharging water into the Gulf of Mexico that did not meet environmental standards. The water contained minute particles of oil and minerals despite going through a separation process. The answer, says Khatib, lay in the use of flotation cells, containers in which rotors combined with injected gas create bubbles in the water that stick to the oil and mineral particles, causing them to rise to the surface where they can be skimmed off. The water can then be safely discharged into the sea.

But the Augur is attached to the sea floor by steel tendons rather than a traditional rigid structure, and can move on the surface. This movement could have pushed contaminated water out of the container along with the skimmed oil. Khatib devised a novel design that included a lip inside the cell that prevented this. It is still used today on the Auger and other Shell platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, such as Mars and Ursa.

Among her patents is also a way of collecting surface water when testing for oil contamination. The “sheen sampler” is a fishing rod equipped with plastic tendrils that attract tiny droplets of oil. When cast into the sea they collect oil samples more effectively than previous methods, enabling a more accurate assessment of the oil’s origins. Shell and partners have been using the sheen sampler for several years to investigate reports of leaks from undersea pipes and discharges.

This ability to find practical solutions led to a wider technology role for Khatib in 2003, and later to her current job as head of new business technology marketing for Shell, based in Dubai. But her water expertise remains in demand. She is involved in a review of the benefits and costs of recycling, treatment and re-use of water produced in new oil projects. And the Society of Petroleum Engineers has selected her for the second time to be a Distinguished Lecturer addressing workshops and conferences on water management.

In March Khatib represented Shell at the UN International Women’s Day in New York. Remembering her schooling and her mother’s role in her success, she spoke of education’s role in the empowerment of women.

“As a woman born in the Middle East,” she told the audience, “I learned to appreciate quickly the priceless investment in education that my family has bestowed upon me. This enabled me to grow and develop and empowered me to achieve my global aspirations. Being here in front of you is a real testimony to that.”

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