Field Trials of Ex Situ Smouldering Treatment (STARx) of Oil Sludge

Growing environmental concern and regulations around petroleum producing and refining facilities, along with the divesting of legacy properties, have necessitated the need for rapid, high capacity, and cost-effective treatment technologies for remediating these sites and their produced wastes. Self-sustained liquid smouldering – known as STAR technology - has been studied extensively at small scales and has been proven as an effective in situ remediation technique for heavy hydrocarbons. However, STAR as a large-scale ex situ waste disposal method (STARx) has yet to be demonstrated. Here STARx is evaluated for the first time in soil pile configurations, using an engineered base concept called HottpadTM, at both the prototype (0.35 – 1.3m3) and field (80 – 160m3) scales. The treatment was applied to oily sludge from crude oil tank bottoms and oil water separation processes mixed with sand or soils at concentrations from 4 020 – 115 000mg/kg total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH). The relationships between initial soil concentrations, off-gas production, mass destruction rates, cycle times, and peak temperatures provide important insights into the performance and costs of applying the technology at field scale. STARx was shown to successfully destroy the wastes to below laboratory detection limits, with contaminant mass removal efficiencies of greater than 98% being observed. Overall, this work demonstrates for the first time that STARx is a viable large-scale option for hydrocarbon sludge treatment.

Name thesis:degree_name

M Eng Sci

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

The University of Western Ontario

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Murray, Cody

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Gerhard, Jason I.
• Grant, Gavin P.

• Smouldering combustion
• ex situ
• remediation
• waste oil
• sludge
• STARx
• Hottpad
• field-scale

Language dc:language.iso

en_ca

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14721/29263

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uwo.scholaris.ca:20.500.14721/29263