11/3/2019 refinery-process-water

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Tratamiento y purificación del agua / Industrias / Petróleo y Gas / refinery-process-water

Petrochemical Company
The process-intensive petrochemical industry has demanding environmental management challenges to protect water, soil and atmosphere
of the refinery pollution.
Lenntech comes up with different kinds of technologies and processes to the wastewater and the process water from the refinery industries.
Petroleum refineries use relatively large volumes of water, especially for cooling systems. In fact, wastewater from the petrochemical
industry usually contains hazardous chemicals, as hydrocarbons, phenol or ammoniacal nitrogen among others.
Below we will see some petroleum refinery waste and process water issues.

In order to understand the scope of the issue first take a look in our general drawing about the petroleum refining practices to enter in heart
of the subject.

Please find below a table to summarize the different kinds of wastes generated by petroleum refineries:

Pollution Approximate Quantities

Cooling systems 3.5-5 m3 of wastewater generated per ton of crude

BOD 150-250 mg/l

COD 300-600 mg/l

phenol 20-200 mg/l

oil 100-300 mg/l (desalter water)

Polluted wastewater
oil 5000 mg/l in tank bottom

benzene 1-100 mg/l

heavy metals 0.1-100 mg/l

Solid waste and sludge 3 to 5 kg per ton of crude (80 % should be considered as hazardous waste because of the heavy metals and toxic organic presence)

VOC emissions 0.5 to 6 kg/ton of crude

BTX (Benzene, Toluene and Xylene) 0.75 to 6 g/ton of crude

Sulfur oxides 0.2-0.6 kg/ton of crude
Others emissions
Nitrogen oxides 0.006-0.5 kg/ton of crude

(all this figures depend on the process configuration but we give here a general guide)

Resource: Pollution Prevention and Abatement Handbook World Bank Group

The petrochemical companies should tackle with several issues:

Salts in the feedstock (corrosion and fouling problems) and aromatics (source of VOC):

Petroleum refineries do not like salts in their feedstock since these corrode and foul process equipment. The first refining step is desalination where a hot water wash extracts the salts.
Otherwise it's common to use an antirust or corrosion inhibitors in the fuel. If feedstock contains aromatics with a good solubilities such as Benzene or Toluene then some will be in the
desalted effluent and this is a major source of refinery wastewater containing Volatile Organique compounds (VOC).

Aromatics, oil, grease and organic removal :

A direct treatment of the wastewater with activated carbon reduces aromatics content to below acceptable limits. In addition, the carbon also captures oil, grease and other organics.
Activated carbon is also used to remove heavy hydrocarbons from hydrogen and light organic gas streams in the refinery. (Refinery gas treatment). An other application of the actived
carbon is to enhance the oil refinery activated sludge. This is completed by addition of PAC (powered activated carbon) into the sludge.

Phenol and ammoniacal nitrogen removal with a biological treatment:

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In order to remove phenol and nitrogen the best solution is to use a biological treatment thanks to hydrogen peroxide for instance. Furthermore in using a catalyst combine with the H2O2
it's possible to remove COD, BOD5 and toxicity of the waste water. Besides, phenols are transformed into less biodegradable compounds which could be removed by subsequent
coagulation and precipitation.

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