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

Polymers vs. SAS Chemistry

Are you sure polymers are the best option for your oil sludge treatment operations? 

One of the most frequently asked questions we receive is, “how are the SASES chemicals different from ploymers (flocking agents)?”

In this post, I’d like to provide a simple explanation as to how they’re different, and in doing so encourage you to ask yourself if polymers are the best option for your oil sludge treatment operations.

This explanation is designed for those with little knowledge of chemistry.  For those who are interested in the full technical explanation, please feel free to give us a call to discuss in more detail.   It’s an extremely interesting topic, but most lose interest after the first 30 seconds.

I’ll start by defining what I mean by the term “oil sludge & slops” and typically what our customers are trying to achieve through treatment.   “Oil sludge & slops” are typically waste streams with a high content of oil and solids, with water making up anywhere from 10% - 90% of the waste.  Typically, the objective when treating this type of waste is to recover the useable oil, clean the solids for disposal and clean the water, which is sent to a wastewater treatment facility.   Therefore, the goal is more oil recovery, cleaner solids and cleaner water. 

 Here are a few images of typical oil sludge and slops:

How are the chemistries different?

Polymer based chemistries (or flocking agents) are “grabbing” chemistries.  They are extremely effective at pulling particles together to form large cluster sizes.  In the case of oil sludge, which contain water, oil and solids, flocking agents pull the oil and solid particles together, leaving a clean water phase.  However, the downside of this type of chemistry is that you’re left with very tightly bound oil and solids, making it extremely difficult to remove the oil from the solids.  In most cases, the use of polymers in this type of application results in extremely difficult to treat oil-contaminated solids.  So, with polymers you get clean water, but very oily solids and you recover almost no oil.

The surfactant-based micro-emulsion developed by SASES is a “releasing” chemistry.  The chemistry is specifically designed to break the chemical bond that holds the oil to the solids.  This means that when the SASES chemistry comes in contact with the oil contaminated solids, the oil is released.  Once the oil is released from the solids, gravity does the rest of the work to separate the oil, water and solid phases – in some cases centrifugation is used to accelerate the separation process.    The advantage of this approach is that you’re left with a very clean solid, clean water and an extremely high quality oil that can be recovered and recycled/re-used or sold on the open market. 

Here is an image of the waste after being treated with the micro-emulsion:

Polymers are useful for water treatment as there is not a high proportion of solids and/or oil in this type of waste.   However, as the waste stops being a “contaminated water” or “oily water” and becomes a thicker oil sludge or slop, polymers often make the problem worse, instead of being part of the solution.  

Polymers absolutely have their place in the waste treatment industry.  However, there are definitely other types of chemistries that are more effective on the “thicker” more “oily” wastes. 

Find out more about micro-emulsion chemistry in our Whitepaper.

Oil Waste Preparation - An Important Step in Treating your Liquid Waste

A Story of Ecuador Oil Waste…

Today, we want to share with you the importance of preparing your oil waste before applying your customized treatment. It is one of our key steps when designing a liquid waste solution. We’ll showcase its importance through one of our case studies. It concerns the delivery and commissioning of a SAS MIST 220 system for the treatment of oil sludge to a waste management company based in Ecuador.

From Solid to Liquid Waste…

This is a really fascinating project and this particular company had a number of waste issues that it wanted to address and opportunities that it wanted to capture. It involved both liquid waste from refinery operations, traditional sludge with a high oil content that could be recovered and solids which would be able to go to bioremediation at the site. At this site there was already a lot of bioremediation work being carried out of hydrocarbon contaminated land and soil. Some of that waste takes a very long time to bioremediate and that limits how much waste you can process through bioremediation. But if you can take waste that has relatively high hydrocarbons and put it through the system and using our chemistry and engineering to remove as much of the hydrocarbons as you can, then that opens up the capability of processing more waste on site and therefore growing your business.

The Importance of Blending…

In this case the system was designed both to take liquid waste, but it also had to take more solid waste. What we did in this case is we modified the waste before it actually went through the separation stage. Here we used two blending tanks that were built by a local design and engineering company. Those blending tanks allowed the customer to add oil or water to the solid waste to actually create a liquid waste. Then we put that liquid sludge through the SAS MIST system and using our chemistry, the result was very dry solids that can either go to a landfill or be further bioremediated. The liquid waste, the oil in the water would simply come out the other end and would be recovered.

Waste Evaluation Process…

The way we approached this case was to start off with a waste evaluation and process development stage where we really got to know the company that we worked with, the ways that they were looked to process and what their customer requirements were. Part of the process was to perform site surveys where we looked at what waste is on site, what is the layout, what is the nature of the waste. There was a lot of waste in this particular site and some of it had been there for a long time, going through bioremediation. We were really trying to do an assessment to see if some of this waste was quite liquid. We concluded that we could process it and other waste already far down the bioremediation route, for it there probably no point of putting it through the system.

In conclusion, it was just an evaluation of what there was on site and making sure that we knew exactly what we could do.Ultimately it came to the point where the system was about ready to be delivered and we worked with the team locally so that they were completely prepared for the arrival of our engineers and chemists and also of the MIST system itself. We got some excellent results with really dry solids, which we were expecting. And so, to get a really good meaningful outcome, it was a fantastic project to be involved in. If you have any questions contact us via email via telephone ,find us on Linkedin find us on Youtube ,leave a comment, ask a question and we will definitely, reply and get back to you as soon as we can and hopefully we'll have an opportunity to work with you as much as we enjoyed working with this particular project.

Thank you very much,

Mark Zwinderman |CEO

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.

Mud Tank Cleaning Using Microemulsions

We are all aware of the traditional method of manual mud tank cleaning, where teams of trained personnel enter contaminated mud tanks, often erecting scaffolding in order to gain access to the higher parts of the wall and the roof of the tank. However, we don't think this is the most efficient or effective way to get the cleaning done...

Manually cleaning mud tanks is time intensive, costly, and overall a very dirty, tiring job. When you take all these factors into consideration, it is definitely time to find a new way to approach this old issue. We believe the answer lies within the development of microemulsion delivery systems for the cleaning of drilling rig mud pits and platform supply vessels. 

Microemulsion chemical technology, when paired with an innovative mechanical delivery system, really reaches a new, optimised level of tank cleaning with fewer health and safety issues compared to the traditional method of operation. Cleaning operations can also be greatly enhanced through the use of 'cleaning in place systems' or 'CIP'. These systems consist of designed skids containing filtration and pumping equipment capable of delivering sufficient pressure and flow to deliver a microemulsion solution to as many as four mud tanks at a time!

By using geared cleaning nozzles, the entire inside of a mud tank can be covered with a microemulsion cleaning solution within a matter of minutes. This minimises man entry into the mud tank, resulting in a fraction of the time being required. Once these nozzles are in place and connected to the CIP system, the microemulsion cleaning solution is pumped through the system and breaks up the drilling mud on the tank walls and the mud cake on the tank floor. The resulting liquid waste can be easily removed using standard pumping equipment.

The microemulsion technology breaks down the mud, creating low viscous slurry. This waste stream is then placed either in a weir tank where solids can settle, and the liquid is reused for further cleaning operations, or the waste is treated using hydro cyclones and/or filtration equipment. The use of microemulsion chemistry allows for a continuous mud tank cleaning process, either onshore for the processing of supply vessels or offshore on the rig.

More information on microemulsions is available on our website!

How Microemulsions Can Solve Your Decommissioning Problems

Decommissioning is undoubtedly a major operational and environmental challenge for operators in the North Sea and other geographic locations. Following some highly publicised decommissioning projects there is pressure on operators and their service partners to adopt the best available technology and the best environmental option wherever possible, to ensure operations are carried out in a safe and environmentally sound manner.

One of the major environmental concerns is how best to clean out heavily contaminated storage tanks in order to reduce the risk of environmental contamination during the dismantling process. There is also pressure on operators to carry out as much remediation work as possible offshore. This is so that the removal and disposal of the waste streams can be carried out on site rather than risk the regulatory consequences of transporting this type of waste back to shore. In general, the decommissioning process can be very risky business involving some serious potential hazards and many unknowns.

It is clear the cleaning operations are not simple, with structures offering little or no access it makes surveying and pre-assessment difficult, and sometimes impossible. Due to this, it is necessary to find an inventive fluid-based solution for cleaning, rather than one based on engineering alone. This is where SAS-ES come in with our response to the problem... Microemulsion cleaning technology.

Our aqueous-based and water-soluble cleaning product range has been proven in the field and demonstrated as one of the most effective forms of cleaning solution available to the upstream oil and gas sector. It has already been successfully used for wellbore cleanup and surface/solids cleaning applications. 

This chemical product range boasts many advantages, being safe to handle with all products classified as readily biodegradable and non-hazardous for transport. The waste produced from this cleaning operation can also be minimised on site and treated in a straightforward manner in order to produce clean solids recovered, clean water for disposal and recovered organic phases for recycling/reuse.

Typically, hazardous oil contaminated waste volumes have been reduced by 70-100% through the implementation of this technology. We'll take that as a success!

Learn more about microemulsions by having a look at our other blog posts on the topic!