If you’re involved in treating oil-contaminated slops and sludges, it’s likely you use a centrifuge in your treatment process.
We love centrifuges and centrifuge operators, and in most cases, they love us as well. This is because centrifuges almost always improve the effectiveness of SAS chemicals, and SAS chemicals almost always improve the performance of centrifuges.
Read MoreMany customers arrive at our website or call us after having considered a number of options for their oil slops treatment. The standard for treating this waste is still to try and de-water using some kind of chemistry or blend the waste with oil solids and process through an energy intensive, slow thermal type of process.
The difference between de-watering oil slops waste and genuine treatment using the SASES chemistry and process is fundamental and creates a completely new economy in waste management.
De-watering only ever removes part of the water from the waste. At time this is very good quality water, however it concentrates the remaining water in a matrix consisting of solids, oil, chemicals and water. This resulting concentrated slurry or sludge is then very hard to treat. So, effectively removing part of the water has reduced the waste volume and now the remaining waste is much harder to process. Often landfill or thermal processing are the only realistic options available for this sludge.
In order to landfill the waste in many cases the sludge has to be stabilised or fixed and this approach doubles (sometimes triples) the total volume of the waste for transport and disposal. Thermal processing (often combined with drill cuttings) is energy intensive and slow.
Our unique chemistry in comparison creates a three-way split between the oil, water and solids. This means oil is recovered with an economic value, all the water is recovered, and only dry solids remain for disposal to landfill or back to sea.
Let us use a simple example to illustrate the possible difference in operations.
There is 1,000 tons (or m³) of oil slops waste to be treated. This consists of 20% oil, 70% water and 10% solids. In a de-watering process this would look as the following:
The first step is to de-water the slops using standard de-watering chemistry.
This creates a 50/50 split. The top half (500m³) is good quality, clear water. The bottom half consists of the remaining water (40%), oil (40%), chemicals and solids (20%).
The clear water is discharged.
The bottom sludge needs to go to landfill and requires stabilising or fixing (choose your favourite material – sawdust, ash, etc.). We assume a 1:1 blend of sludge with fixing material.
Now there is 1,000 m³ of solid waste to go to landfill.
When using the SASES chemistry the process is minimised as following:
The original slop waste is dosed, and a three-way split is created.
The water (70%) is discharged, the oil (20%) is recovered and re-used or sold and only the dry solids (10%) go to landfill.
There is only 100m³ of solid waste to dispose of. An order of magnitude less compared to traditional de-watering chemistry.
Let's focus on the benefits of SASES unique chemistry. You're not only disposing of less solids but you're also gaining value through oil recovery. If we follow the previous example your numbers would look as following:
The oil has a value (let’s assume $300/m³) and 200m³ of oil equates to $60,000.
If we assume transport and landfill is $100/m³ (I am sure you all know the figure locally and this of course varies hugely around the world, but we have to pick a number) the landfill costs for de-watering are 1,000m³x $100 =$100,000.
So, already we have a cost of $100,000 for de-watering and no recovered value.
For the SASES three-way split the landfill costs are 100m³ x $100 = $10,000.
For the SASES approach we have $10,000 disposal cost and $60,000 oil value recovered. This equates to a difference between de-watering and SASES of $150,000 in favour of the SASES approach.
If this approach sounds like something you would be interested in, simply contact us today! We would be happy to hear from you.
SAS-ES were supplied with a sample of oil slops waste (pictured right) from operations in Texas, USA where an effective chemical dosing and separation process was being sought. For this project, SAS-ES were set the task of maximising oil and solids recovery, so that the clean water fraction could be recovered for polishing and safe disposal via salt-water disposal wells. This would require SAS-ES products to effectively split the waste into three distinct phases of oil, water and solids, in order to maximise the recovery of clean oil, thus retaining a high water quality for disposal.
Here's how SAS-ES successfully dealt with this oil slops treatment project.
What we did...
Samples of the waste were dosed directly with different SAS-ES products, then shaken thoroughly for 30 seconds and spun in a spin out rotor centrifuge at 3,000rpm for 2 minutes. Gravity separation tests were also conducted and all testing was carried out at room temperature.
The results...
When the oil slop sample was treated with SAS-ES products there was a rapid and marked improvement in oil, water and solids separation was observed, and a higher quality water fraction was produced. Each product tested performed well, including our SAS SlopTreat products, which are the most cost effective and environmentally sound.
In the case of this oil slop sample, separation using gravity could be achieved in just 2 minutes! As shown in the picture below.
In the test when centrifugation was used, a clean separation was achieved to yield a clean water fraction for disposal, a clean oil phase on the surface and a fine solids fraction as a lower phase. As shown in the picture below.
So to sum up...
The SAS SlopTreat products have the ability to greatly enhance the treatment of the oil slop sample. Not only did SAS-ES enable faster separation, but we also enabled a cleaner and more efficient separation to take place allowing recovery of clean water, oil and solids phases.
It is clear without the SAS SlopTreat chemistry this waste sample would not readily separate and oil recovery would not be possible!
