Understanding Your Oil Waste

The treatment of oil slops and oil sludge is rarely boring.

What is sludge to one person is a slop to another and what is oil mud to one person is often cuttings to the next person. When an inquiry comes into our office for the treatment of oil waste, we have learned it is critical to make sure there is a shared agreed language on what type of waste we are dealing with.

Depending on the nature of the waste, the composition and the origin different outcomes can be achieved and a range of treatment options should be considered.

It is not uncommon for the oil sludge to be a mixture of different wastes. There can be heavy oil solids, clay or sand, water, oily emulsion and liquid oil. There is often a mixture of all of these and at times there will be separate areas in the pit or tank.

Often all of the waste is homogenised and then processed as one type of waste. In general this results in poor treatment outcomes and traps a lot of the recoverable oil in a sludge matrix. Not a good thing.

Before the treatment process is designed and implemented it is important to really understand the waste.

• How much of the waste is solids?

• How much free oil is there? And can we recover it?

• What is the water content?

• Is there previous treatment chemistry in the waste?

• Does the waste separate out under gravity?

• How does the waste respond when we expose it to chemistry?

• Can we mix the waste and treat the it successfully or should we treat the phases separately?

A short 2 – 3 day site visit and waste evaluation by SASES can prevent massive costs later in fixing unsuitable waste treatment processes. Really understanding your oil waste is what we do at SASES. We can come in, evaluate, assess and design the right process for your oil waste and your required outcomes.

Don’t bring us in to fix your process, bring us in first to create the right outcomes.

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Our goal is to support and empower you as our partner, in correctly and efficiently treating your oil waste. We put together a comparison sheet outlining the ways our SASES products work in oil waste treatment processes compared to other treatment methods like polymers for de-watering or thermal desorption and even stabilizing the waste. You will see some of the more obvious benefits as well as other elements you may not have considered when looking at our products. Discover them by downloading our comparison sheet.

Model 2 : Disposal of Stabilized Oil Sludge

The Scenario

Let us imagine that we have 50 000 tonnes of liquid oil sludge in a storage somewhere and we must move this sludge about 600 km to the nearest disposal site that is willing to accept it. However, the disposal site will only accept it if it is a solid waste not as a liquid waste. There are several ways to proceed from here, but what is becoming increasingly relevant in today's world now is how much carbon footprint our treatment process incurs.

The Treatment Method

A method that is used to turn liquid sludge into a solid waste so that it is safer for disposal and accepted in more disposal sites is by stabilizing or fixing the waste. This is usually done by adding a stabilizing agent to the waste. The stabilizing agent obviously must be taken to the waste; it must be mixed at the site.  The stabilizing agent is usually a clay or perhaps sawdust, depending on the site location. This process increases the waste volume, but it does turn into a solid. Once solid, with no free liquid visible, the waste will have increased the total volume by a factor of three or four. This quantity then must be transported by truck to the disposal site, 600 km away, where it is safely and securely stored for eternity.

The SAS MIST Process

This is one way of doing it, but obviously, we are increasing the waste volume by a factor of three or four. It seems contra intuitive to create more waste just to treat the waste. Alternatively, what we can do is add a little bit of our SAS chemistry and put it through our SAS MIST process. What happens then is rather than adding stabilizers to the waste to turn it into a solid material, we actually remove the water and the oil, leaving only dry solids. The oil is recovered, and the water will be reused. We are left only with the dry solids that we then transport to the disposal site.

 The Advantage

That is a huge saving, rather than increasing the waste volume by 300% or 400 %. we are actually reducing the volume of the waste by about 90 % here, so the carbon footprint is going to be substantially smaller. In the case of this particular example, you're looking at over 20 000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions for stabilizing the waste and transporting it or you're looking at about 1400 tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions for the SAS MIST process and only transporting a much smaller fraction of the waste. The impact on the carbon footprint by actually treating at the site of storage or generation is absolutely massive.

Your Benefit

How will this help you? By decreasing treatment costs, reducing long-term exposure, making your processes more efficient and staying ahead of your competition by being part of a progressive and sustainable route to Zero Carbon.

Download the Companion Factsheet to the video to find out more.

3 Reasons Why It's Important to be On-Site for Treatment Trials

Update: We are living strange times where our way of doing business is challenged. It was not always clear why on-site treatment trials were the best approach to designing a customized solution for your waste. However, now, with the current travel restrictions in place and left with no choice it becomes even more obvious that this practice was how the industry was moving forward when dealing with waste.

When working with our clients to find solutions for oil slops and oil sludge treatment challenges, we often spend significant time on-site to fully understand the treatment process and to support field treatment trials.   

Our customers typically work through a 5-step process with us in order to find and implement the best possible solution.

Step 1: Test waste samples in the lab

Step 2: Site visit to fully understand the situation and processing setup

Step 3: Work together to design and run the appropriate field trial

Step 4: Review results and learnings

Step 5: Implement on a larger scale as appropriate

Being on-site for steps 2 & 3 is very important and contributes greatly to a successful outcome.  There are three key reasons why we believe being on-site for these steps is so important:  

“Minor” details can have a major impact – No matter how many telephone calls, web conferences or even face-to-face meetings held prior the trial, it’s impossible to cover every detail. Some seemingly insignificant details can have a significant impact on the outcome.  Many of these details can only become apparent by being on-site and seeing, hearing and feeling the situation.   

Not everything goes to plan – Despite planning every trial thoroughly, in a live waste treatment environment, very rarely does everything go to plan. The waste stream may change, a piece of equipment may break, a key person may get ill and not be on-site… to name just a few. In most cases there’s a solution, but it requires being on-site in order to find a workable solution that still delivers a successful field trial.

If at first you don’t succeed – Every oil sludge treatment situation is unique – the objectives, the equipment, the setup, the waste stream and the operators. Additionally, the SAS-ES microemulsions behave differently from other chemistries. With all of these variables, it is often the case that the first test during a field trial will not provide be the best result. However, because we are able to pull on thousands of past experiences and a detailed knowledge of how the products work, we can very quickly begin to make hypothesis as to what is going on and why. We can then modify and optimize the approach accordingly. Without being on-site this type of rapid testing and learning is more difficult. 

If you think we could help you, we would love to hear from you, get in contact and request a proposal for a SAS-ES on-site evaluation. Easy as that!

Designing a Solution that delivers

I was at a trial once in Aberdeen where our chemistry was used to treat some particularly difficult oil drilling waste. The results were not good to put it mildly. We knew the chemistry worked as we had done the initial assessment. We also knew the equipment was fine.

The problem of course was that the process was not well designed. The wrong equipment was being used with our chemistry. Equipment used for solids control was being pushed into a waste treatment role with a totally new type of chemistry and so the engineers onsite went with what they knew. Not a good day at the office!

However, the fastest and best learning comes from getting things wrong and within a few days we turned things around. An important lesson to take on board. It is crucial to design the right process including waste handling on-site, equipment included, skills required and managing and disposing of output materials and all this while taking into account the location (remote site in Africa, next to a refinery, offshore Canada?).

Many of our clients are companies that have invested in waste processes and equipment unsuitable for the waste being treated or not capable of meeting the expected and required outputs. Our job is to help and try to augment or adapt the process in place so performance can be improved using our unique chemistry. In many cases this can be done with fairly limited changes. In some situations, the process in place is wholly unsuitable and a new process needs to be put in place.

Design is not just the decision on whether a decanter centrifuge is needed. Design includes the establishment of a treatment plan, a site plan and that key understanding of what needs to be achieved by the client.

As a company we have found our unique place in the oil waste treatment industry by specialising in designing and delivering the right solutions all based around that amazing chemical technology that separates out oil slops and oil sludge.

Assessing the waste parameters

In my previous blog post on the process we use at SAS Environmental Services to deliver the right solution to each of our clients I covered the importance we place on understanding the issues surrounding the oil waste and the required outcomes to achieved.

In this blog I want to talk a little bit about the second step on the road to successful waste treatment. We call it the “Assess” step and it really contains a lot of our experience of gained in successfully managing oil waste projects and the effectiveness of our unique chemical technology in new and existing operations.

Because we have a unique chemical technology that enables a whole new way of treating and managing oil based waste the assumption is often that the chemistry needs to be tested on the waste itself. In most cases this is not needed as we already know from 20 years of operations where the chemistry will be effective and where it will not. The assessment here is about the exact parameters of the oil waste in questions and the nature of the treatment process. Oil waste such as slop or sludge is almost always variable in composition. This means any effective treatment process will need to have several steps. This can include a pre-screening step, blending in of solvents or oil or water and the use of heat. The assessment going on at this stage is the determination of the steps needed to take the waste from one state (the start) to another state (treated). This often takes the form of conversation with the client and at times some additional lab work to confirm and evaluate the impact of these waste manipulations.

“The assessment here is about the exact parameters of the oil waste in questions and the nature of the treatment process. ”

— Mark Zwinderman | CEO

Once we have an outline of the steps needed to treat the waste and we have a clear view of the operational circumstances (Remote site? Power availability? Space?) we can sit down with the client and discuss the economics of the process, what investments are required and to what extent the existing infrastructure can be augmented using our technology to improve results.

At this point we have a clear picture of the steps needed to treat the waste and the operational circumstances in which to treat the waste. There is also a good understanding of the expected economics. That means it is time to “Design” the process and solution! More on that step in the next blog.

Key Steps to Evaluate your Oil Waste Treatment Process

Here at SAS Environmental Services we believe there are certain key steps you should take when evaluating how to treat your oil waste treatment process. These steps include identifying your objectives, looking after your decanter centrifuge, finding the best chemistry possible, and developing the most effective waste process. Here's a bit more information...

Objectives

It is important to identify your objectives at the start of your oil waste treatment process. Understanding what you need from your waste process should be the first step to success. This could be: oil with less than 4% water, reduced waste to landfill by 50%, water clean enough for re-use, increased oil recovery, etc.               

If you are not achieving your ultimate goal it is important to evaluate your process in detail to identify where improvements can be made. If you are achieving your goals it could be beneficial to evaluate your process to assess if there is potential to improve further or achieve better-cost savings.                 

It can also be good to look at any historical records that clearly show the data and how often the needed results were achieved. You can then assess what the circumstances were when these results were achieved. 

Decanter Centrifuge

We often see decanters that have not been serviced regularly and in many cases the fact that results are less than optimum are down to basic issues with the decanter. Often the decanter has been used for different waste in the past and the settings are not optimized, this is not always difficult to solve and can make a huge difference to your results.   

Is the manufacturer manual available? If so what is the recommendation for daily maintenance for the equipment? Greasing? Lubrication? Cleaning?

It may sound like an obvious thing to have to check but we have seen this quite a few times when the scroll is running the wrong way inside the centrifuge. Again, easily fixed once spotted but will cause a whole range of issues if it is not resolved.

A scroll that is worn down or damaged will affect the size and shape of the beach inside the decanter and the movement of the solids within the equipment. Regular maintenance can detect and prevent this. Protection of the scroll through tungsten carbide protection is one option to reduce scroll damage.      

Often the people that were trained to use the decanter have moved on in the organization or left altogether. The new individuals responsible have not always been through decanter operation and maintenance training. Even 1 or 2 days of basic training can have a measurable impact on the process

Cleaning of the interior of the decanter at regular intervals will prevent blocking the equipment and keep performance levels high.

Often decanters are set once for a type of waste and left in that configuration. The waste you are treating today might be quite different from the waste that was treated when the decanter was set up. A few basic changes in the decanter settings can have a big impact on the outcome of the process.                       

Chemistry

If you are not using chemistry in your process it is worth considering the injection of emulsion breaking chemistry.                     

A dosing pump that is not properly serviced can inject the wrong amount of additive. This means low performance or bad economics. If it is not calibrated, you do not know how much chemical you are injecting. This is a must. The dosing pump is often overlooked and calibrating this can sometimes save 50% on the chemical cost and have a significant impact on the result of the treatment process. 

As the composition of the waste changes regularly you need to check to see if a higher or lower dose rate of chemistry might give you better results. You can do this by conducting small lab tests to check the results. If you speak to your chemical provider, they may be able to help you with guidelines on does rate changes with different types of waste streams. This simple step can lead to a small investment with big potential pay back.                        

Your waste changes and so does the best chemistry. Set aside time once a quarter or once a year to do a review. New chemistry comes on the market, waste changes. What worked last year might not be the best solution next year.             

Waste Process

Different types of waste should have different "play-books" to treat the waste most effectively. Develop the best approach and create check-lists.

Keeping oil rich waste separate will allow you to recover oil more efficiently. This oil has real value. Diluting it with low-oil waste makes recovery more expensive and technically challenging. If you are not already doing this, you might be throwing out some real value. 

If you recover oil but this has too many solids or too much water, you want to assess the chemical treatment possibilities available.

SAS-ES can help you in any of these steps, we can carry out a lab evaluation for you to help you evaluate the best process for the waste you are treating. This will allow you to implement the necessary changes to consistently meet your objectives. If this sounds like something you would be interested in please get in contact, we would love to hear from you!