A trip to Canada

This oil slops treatment case study from SAS Environmental Services takes us all the way to Alberta, Canada. I love Canada, it is one of my absolute favourite places in the whole world, for doing business there as well.

We were just outside Edmonton in an oil waste treatment facility and we were there for four weeks. This facility took in all sorts of liquid waste from oil field activities, from production activities, from drilling and exploration activities. All of it was liquid slops waste with small amounts of oil in it, some fines in it and some water in it.  What they tried to do there is basically separate out the solids. The solids would go to hazardous waste landfill sites and the recovered water they would try to re-inject.

Oil - Water - Solids

There was very little oil in the waste we were told, maybe between no oil at all and 2%, so they were not getting any oil out really, and they weren't expecting there to be an awful lot of oil to recover. We shipped a bunch of chemicals up and we shipped an inline static mixer with a chemical injection point that allowed us to inject chemistry directly into the floor line just before the decanter centrifuge that they already had installed. This worked really, really well, so after injecting about 0.75 % of our SAS SlopTreat 135SC product we got a fantastic split. The solids that were recovered were really dry coming out of the centrifuge. In fact, the solids were so good and of such high quality that instead of a hazardous landfill site all the solids that were produced in the trial ended up going to a non-hazardous landfill site, which was a massive saving. We were told that instead of about a 6-hour drive, it decreased to only a 30-minute drive to the landfill site.

We improved oil recovery from what was at best 2% and we got to 16% oil recovery. In fact, we recovered so much oil there wasn't enough storage for it and, of course, the value of that oil was very significant. The addition of the SAS chemistry also improved to decant the centrifuge throughput by 33%, which meant they could process more waste on a daily basis, and this worked really smoothly and easily.

The solids that we recovered from the process were really dry and the btex levels were down so far that under btex regulations instead of hazardous these solids could now be disposed of in a non-hazardous landfill site. Also, these solids didn’t need any solidifying or stabilizing with any other solids. They are just completely dry.

Keep Canada Amazing

So, we achieved a massive increase in oil recovery in this particular project, which was an absolute tremendous success as our customer put it. We did a little bit of keeping Canada amazing. It's a beautiful country and it feels really good to be a small part of making sure that Canada stays amazing just a fraction more.  

If you want to know more about this particular trial and if you want to know more about the SAS SlopTreat 135SC you can get in touch with us and we would be more than happy to answer your questions.