Abstract
Environmentalists are prioritizing reuse, recycling, and recovery systems to meet rising water demand. Diving into produced water treatment to enable compliance by the petroleum industry to meet discharge limits has increased research into advanced treatment technologies. The integration of biological degradation of pollutants and membrane separation has been recognized as a versatile technology in dealing with produced water with strength of salts, minerals, and oils being produced during crude refining operation. This review article presents highlights on produced water, fundamental principles of membrane bioreactors (MBRs), advantages of MBRs over conventional technologies, and research progress in the application of MBRs in treating produced water. Having limited literature that specifically addresses MBRs for PW treatment, this review also attempts to elucidate the treatment efficiency of MBRs PW treatment, integrated MBR systems, general fouling, and fouling mitigation strategies.
Highlights
The petroleum refinery industry plays a major role in providing energy to meet the world’s energy demand and industrial activities; its exploration comes with huge environmental risks
The ion exchange membrane bioreactors (IEMBRs) was patented two decades ago and it incorporates Donnan dialysis, a concentration gradient driven counter transport process where the feed stream with targeted ionic pollutants pass through a non-porous anion exchange membrane into a receiving bio-compartment, which bio reduces under anoxic conditions [105–108]
The implementation of ecofriendly wastewater technologies is important in achieving management policies of meeting discharge limits and increasing reusability of treated wastewater as a source water
Summary
The petroleum refinery industry plays a major role in providing energy to meet the world’s energy demand and industrial activities; its exploration comes with huge environmental risks. Refining crude oil into useful products demands huge amounts of water for processes such as distillation, cracking, polymerization, alkylation, hydrotreating, desalting, treatment, and finishing of petroleum products [3,5,6]. In this case, it is estimated that one barrel of refined oil produces nearly 10 barrels of wastewater [5]. Due to the hazardous constituents of PW, its management has been met with stricter oil and gas policies and legislation to avoid interference with environmental sustainability These regulatory policies and standards vary from country to country and non-compliance could result in civil penalties, large fines, international criminal prosecution, and lost or deferred production [28].
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