Implementation of a process for the treatment of hydrocarbon-contaminated soil using petroleum production water

Abstract

Oil-Pipeline and Oil-Well accidents, and leaky underground storage Oil-tanks can all permanently contaminate massive areas of soil, making them economically useless as well as dangerous to the human health, biological resources, and ecosystems. There are many method of treatment of these contaminated soil by hydrocarbons [1]: stabilization/solidification, bioremediation [2], incineration, soil washing, etc. The present work focuses on the treatment of the contaminated soil by the hydrocarbons with soil washing process using oilfield producedwater (PW). The methodological approach consists of researching the optimum conditions of soil washing based on the optimum of moisture’sparametersbetween PW and contaminated soil such as Liquid/Solid ratio and Liquid/Solid contact time. Another parameter was analysed, it is the successive wash test. The contaminated soil before applying the treatment has 1900 ppm of Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH). After many washing test, the optimum parameters of test were fixed as follow: The optimum of Liquid/Solid ratio was 100 ml / 100 g and the optimum of Liquid/Solid contact time was 5 minutes.With these optimum conditions and after 4 successive soil washing, we succeeded to reduce the percentage of residual TPH in contaminated soil from 1,9%(1900 ppm) to 0,1% (100 ppm).

Keywords:Petroleum industry, Produced Water (PW), Contaminated soil, Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH), Soil washing.