The chemicals to watch out for in Oil Waste Treatment

Ever feel that the oil waste being delivered to your site is not what you were told to expect? Yes, I thought so. You are not alone in this and that may or may not be a comfort to know. Oil slops and sludge come in a wide range of varieties and even from the same tank, mud pit or waste pit the consistency of the waste will often differ greatly.

We have worked with waste management companies since 2000 and we understand the day-to-day issues in running a process designed to treat one type of waste when in reality a whole range of liquids, watery slops, oily slops, heavy sludge and solids with a wee bit of oil appear. Always with the expectation the material will be treated with the same process.

With our SludgeTreat products our customers can broaden the range of waste types their process can treat. Our SludgeTreat products work on most oil slops and sludge waste and create a great separation between the oil, water and solids. If you use a decanter this is like adding a whole new capability to your equipment. Now the dial will go up to 11.

Simply by adding the SludgeTreat to the oil waste and mixing it this effect will take place. Mixing can be done inline through a static mixer or in a tank with good mixing capability. We can often make a customer’s process work just through circulating the waste with chemical through a pump.

If you have a tricanter for the treatment of oil waste this chemistry will allow the equipment to become substantially more effective. The reduction in viscosity of the sludge through our SludgeTreat products means better separation of the phases.

Use of SludgeTreat products also increases the effectiveness of the process simply by taking highly viscous sludge and reducing the viscosity.

What does this mean for you in reality? It means dry solids coming from your decanter or tricanter. It means high quality oil recovered for re-use or transport and it means water recovered.

More than anything it means you know that the next truck of oil waste arriving or the next tank you open or the next mud pit you take will get done on time. No drama. The SludgeTreat products give you that extra bit of Oomph!

We love solving oil waste issues and we would love to help solve your oil waste issues, challenges and opportunities.  

Discover our SAS SludgeTreat Product Range

Oil Sludge, Malaysia and Me

An Amazing Country

I’d like to share a recent experience I had in Malaysia as an opportunity to introduce oil sludge from another source that we have not yet covered: the international shipping industry. 

Malaysia is one of my favourite places in the world. This country seems to have it all - beautiful countryside, tropical rainforest, beaches, history, friendly people and a unique blend of cultures. It also has a range of oil sludge waste sites scattered throughout the country that to date have been neglected. The sites have been expensive to clean up and the weak regulatory enforcement has created little motivation to take action.

Malaysia’s place in South East Asia and proximity to Singapore means there is a large volume of shipping waste coming ashore. Add to this the usual waste resulting from Malaysia’s growing oil & gas industry and you get a substantial puddle of oil slops and oil sludge.

 From my experience, this is the situation:

Oil Sludge in Malaysia - The Official Version

A medium sized container vessel will generate 7 tons of oil slop and sludge each day. Advances in technology mean that today some of this waste can be treated onboard the ships while at sea. Yet, large volumes of this bunker fuel sludge, Marpol waste and oil waste slops need to be off-loaded.

The oil sludge waste is stored onboard in waste tanks and off-loaded in ports like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and others. A lot of it is dredged out of the tanks off the coast, placed in 4-ton bags or skips and taken onshore by local waste management companies. The waste is then stored along the coast in a chain of waste management sites.

Oil Sludge in Malaysia - The Personal Version

On my last trip to Malaysia, I took a 3-hour drive through what appeared to be endless palm oil plantations (yes, the SAS products can also handle palm oil sludge), we eventually arrived at a rundown gate. Another short drive through the jungle and we came upon a clearing with a few small buildings, an oil waste site and some very shiny high tech equipment. The car parked right next to the waste site with heavy oil sludge. In this case the waste was bunker fuel sludge from the many containerships and tankers that pass the Malaysian coast travelling to and from China, USA and Europe.  A friendly security guard tied the two angry looking dogs guarding the site to a tree and waved me to come out of the car.

The site was fairly typical of the many oil waste sites that exist along the coast. These sites, either independently owned or part of larger organizations that own multiple sites, are increasingly looking to recover the oil. There is a transition in approach towards this Marpol waste and bunker sludge from waste treatment to oil recovery.

Much of the recovered oil, and even the untreated oil sludge is transported to China by a slew of Chinese freighters. By first recovering the oil, Malaysian companies are providing higher value and higher quality fuel. At the same time the level of waste is greatly reduced. This entire process is not so much driven by regulation as it is in Europe, but by an entrepreneurial spirit and simple economics. The oil is in the waste and the demand for the oil is there.

It’s this entrepreneurial approach you see everywhere in Malaysia that makes it such an exciting place to do business.  Making it economic to do the right thing by cleaning up the waste is precisely what we’re trying to achieve. We want to eliminate waste. One site at a time.

Discover our projects in Indonesia as well.

Oil Sludge Treatment in Scotland

Oil Sludge Challenges

Today we’re going to share with you a brilliant case study of work we carried out at the Ineos refinery in Grangemouth. The Ineos refinery in Grangemouth had about 20 000 tons of oil sludge in storage just outside Edinburgh in Scotland.

The problems were such that 20 000 tons of oil sludge with quite a bit of crude oil still in it was in storage. The only disposal option after a change in regulations was incineration, which had to take place just north of London, in England. That is a very long drive indeed and many trucks needed to move 20 000 tons of oil sludge south a very costly operations. There was a need to try and recover the valuable oil from this crude and reduce the amount of waste for disposal and ideally create waste for disposal that could go to landfill rather than incineration, so this was a fascinating project to get involved in.

Oil Sludge Treatment Design

What we did is we designed a process where we recovered dry solids through the supply of SAS SludgeTreat. What happened is we injected our SAS SludgeTreat chemistry and microemulsion chemistry into the oil sludge. This gets very quickly mixed in inline mixing system and it then goes through a decanter centrifuge inside the unit. The outcome is very dry solids which can go to landfill. The water can go to a wastewater treatment plant. The oil is then recovered and is of a good quality.

Successful Outcomes

This is what we did for 12 years and over the first 4 years alone doing the numbers on the work that we did together Ondeo industrial solutions and the Ineos refinery, we recovered some $4M worth of high quality crude oil through this process that went straight back in to the refining process so this oil was of  a very high standard.

We reduced the waste that had to go to disposal by over 80% that was basically the dry solids that we produced in the decanter. The process doesn't produce a wet sludge, but a very dry solid material and it didn't have to go to incineration, but it went straight to a landfill site. The waste disposal savings in transport landfill tax and disposal costs was $9M over a 4-year period using the SAS SludgeTreat and MIST process.

We played a very small part in keeping Scotland so amazingly beautiful. It's been a brilliant project to be involved in and we would love to get involved in more brilliant projects with you. We would love to create some new case studies that we can share with you so if you have any waste treatment problems, if you have any waste treatment projects you're working on in oil waste then get in touch with us on any one of the many channels that are available. We would love to talk to you and see if we can help you.

Find out more about oil sludge treatment in our Video Case Study by clicking below.

Solid, Liquid, what’s in a name.

We had worked on a number of projects where the nature of the waste was different from how it was described to us. Hazardous waste sample shipping is not always possible depending on the country of origin or the timeline involved. Sometimes we have go and visit the site and work locally. And at times what we find is a surprise.

The nature of oil waste is that the composition is rarely fixed. One pit will have solid waste, liquid waste and anything in between. Our job is to make the process and chemistry work on all of it.

Our MIST process is designed to separate liquid oil waste into solids, water and oil. At times we need to take waste that is high in solids (over 40%) and produce dry solids and remove any free liquids. The decanter will not safely process waste with such a high solids load. However, the SASES Waste Preparation Module is able to modify the waste using oil, water and/or the SAS SludgeTreat chemicals. This modification lowers the viscosity of the waste. By adding water or oil we reduce the overall solids content of the waste going into the decanter. The added oil and water is recovered at the end of the process.

This dual blend tank module enables the system to handle and treat virtually any type of oil waste and separate this into oil, water and solids.

Our project in Ecuador was a great example of our MIST system being augmented with this waste modification ability, providing the ability to the client to treat high solids waste and refinery oil sludge.

To find out more about hoe the SAS MIST performed in Ecuador, watch the video case study by clicking the button below.

Tank Bottom Sludge Oil Recovery

SAS-ES receive many oil sludge waste samples, for this particular project the sample provided was black, oil coloured and contained a high oil content. The sample had been recovered from tank bottom sludge from a crude oil storage tank and sent to us by one of our customers to try and create a three-phase split of oil, water and solids. 

What we did... 

In order to successfully recover any oil present and remove as much of the water and sediment as possible, SAS-ES used a standard screening test method to reach the most effective result.

A sample of the waste was dosed directly with 0.5% of the SAS-ES products. Samples were then shaken thoroughly for 30 seconds and were spun in a spin out rotor centrifuge at 3,000rpm for 2 minutes. The samples were not diluted with water or any hydrocarbon solvent.

The results...

The testing provided different results for each product. However, it is clear the best result was obtained using the SAS SludgeTreat 156SC product, a further picture of this split is shown on the right.

So, to sum up...

After dosing the waste sample with our SAS SludgeTreat 156SC an immediate reduction in viscosity was observed. Our customer gained a significant oil recovery of 54%, with a clear water phase of 38%, meaning that solids only made up about 8% of the total waste stream. 

Another successful oil sludge treatment process by SAS-ES!

Want to find out more about the SludgeTreat 156SC? Contact Us by clicking the button below.

Case Study: Drilling Waste Treatment - Pennsylvania

A waste management company based in Pennsylvania used SAS SludgeTreat 156SC to split and treat heavy emulsified oil slop waste from drilling operations. 

The Problem...

The waste management company was previously using a combination of engineering equipment, dewatering chemistry and heating, which was ineffective at treating the waste to specification. This was due to the complex chemical nature of the slop waste, which was made up of different proportions of oil, water, solids, brines and various other drilling and cleaning chemicals and glycol. 

The waste material ultimately could not be treated and had to be stored onsite taking up valuable tank storage capacity. In addition the waste was sticky and contaminated clarifiers, crystallisation units, filtration equipment, etc.

Any oil that was recovered was actually emulsion waste with 40 - 60% water content. This was well below the requirements of a nearby refinery and any waste oil collection facility.  

The SAS Solution...

The waste management company used SAS SludgeTreat 156SC to treat 60m3 heavily emulsified slop waste using a simple chemical dose, mix and separate process:

• The slop was dosed with the SAS product at a rate of 0.1% by weight

• Mixing was carried out through batch processing

• The treated slop was stored in tanks and a decanter used to separate out the solid and liquid fractions

To Sum Up...

• Total reduction of waste volume = 60%

• Increase in volume of oil recovered = 35%

• Oil quality improvement from 48% water to < 5% water

• No emulsion waste remaining after treatment

• Full 3-way split into dry solids, water and oil