Management of Waste Generated during Crude Oil Refining in the U.S.

Refining crude oil involves is involved in the distribution and marketing of petroleum-derived products. The processes include operations, gas plant processing operations, refining and refinery operations, and refining technologies. Due to these activities, pollutants can be produced in the form of toxic emissions and that are released into the environment. Additionally, various accident and equipment failures can further contaminate the environment include well blowouts, pipeline breaks, tanker accidents, and tank explosions. As a result, such occasions have placed the public at risk from both chronic and acute exposures to various toxic chemicals.

The vast underground oil networks are strictly regulated by a number of government regulatory agencies; from the design and construction stages to operation and discontinuation (often referred to as abandonment) stages. These agencies ensure that the oil and gas network is operated safely, responsibly, and in the public interest, including a large amount of solid waste generated in petroleum refining.

Table 1. Solid Wastes Generated in Petroleum Refining Listed as Hazardous Waste by the EPA¹

Various practices can be used to reduce the amount of waste solids produced, including: segregating rainwater runoff in storm sewers from refinery process streams; identifying benzene sources and installing upstream water treatment; controlling the amount of solids entering sewers (e.g. by street sweeping or relining sewers); and training programs to prevent leaks and spills.

Fig.1 Waste-management Hierarchy²

Waste-management practices include:

• Prevention, such as optimizing drilling operations, keeping hazardous and nonhazardous wastes separate, research efforts and design of new or modified operations and processes, and determination of sludge and water content for feedstock;

• Source reduction or waste minimization, such as using of gravel packs and screening for reduction of volume of solids/sludge generation in E&P sector, proper operation of equipment, and process modifications.

• Reuse, such as use of hydrocarbon bearing soil for road mix or asphalt, and reuse of oily sludge in process units as part of the feed.

• Recycling/recovery, such as recycling drilling muds, recycling scrap metal, recycling paper and plastic, recycling batteries, recovery of oil from tank bottoms via centrifuging and filtering, removal of catalyst from slurry decant oil from process units (e.g., FCC unit) prior to the reuse of it as a feedstock, recovery of valuable metals from spent catalyst, recycling catalyst and coke fines, and valuable product recovery from oily sludge with solvent extraction;

• Disposal, such as incineration, biodegradation, composting, land-spreading, land-farming, landfilling, etc.

Fig.2 Simplified flow diagram of a process of using centrifugation for oily-sludge treatment³

References

• Rosenfeld, P. E., & Feng, L. G. H. (2011). 5 - the petroleum industry. Risks of Hazardous Wastes, 3(4), 57-71.

• Jafarinejad, S. (2017). 3 - environmental impacts of the petroleum industry, protection options, and regulations. Petroleum Waste Treatment & Pollution Control, 85-116.

• Jafarinejad, S. (2017). 7 - solid-waste management in the petroleum industry. Petroleum Waste Treatment & Pollution Control, 269-345.

• Papavinasam, S. (2014). Chapter 1 - The Oil and Gas Industry. Corrosion Control in the Oil and Gas Industry. Elsevier Inc.

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