Industrial wastewater reuse in petroleum refinery using the WSD for regeneration systems

Abstract

Wastewater reuse practices in the industry require an adequate understanding of the characteristics of the manufacture processes, to minimize the water consumption and the generation of effluent. The objective of this work was to apply the WSD method, used to defining the target of minimum process water consumption in a case study of oil refinery, by means of the reuse and recycling operations, including regeneration processes. The importance and influence of the wastewater treatment plant in the regeneration quality, including intermediate process streams, for the reuse and the recycling operations, were evaluated. Furthermore, centralized and distributed treatment flowsheet configurations were tested. Thus, this work presented the solution of a case study with three contaminants in water streams processes, different interconnections approaches, used to illustrate the application of this procedure showing the reduction of water flow rate and total costs compared to the original flowsheet. The scenarios revealed to be greatly promising, and flowsheet configurations were reached with higher than 4 % and 20 % of reduction in the water flow rate consumption and the total costs, respectively. Regarding the ecoefficiency processes, the results demonstrate that the applied technique is successful when the minimum water consumption is the main goal in the industry.