Techno-Economic Modelling of Bioclarified Water Recovery from Petroleum Wastewater Using ASPEN Software and Box-Behnken Design

Abstract

Application and efficiency of bio-coagulants for petroleum wastewater biocoagulation, flocculation, and sedimentation (bioclarification) are still confined to laboratory proof-of-concept practice. The scale-up process design of bio-clarified water recovery from petroleum wastewater has been a major research lacuna. This paper presents ASPEN Base Case Scale-Up Simulation (BCSUS) using optimum laboratory experimental data and techno-economic predictive models for bioclarified water production from petroleum wastewater. The BCSUS, process design, and economics were performed in the ASPEN Batch Process Developer V10 environment. Predictive models for predicting and optimizing techno-economic parameters such as return on investment (ROI), payback time (PBT), and production rate (PR) were achieved in RSM via the Box-Behnken Design (BBD) technique of Design Expert V13. The base case techno-economic model gave batch size, annual production cost, Total Capital Investment (TCI), PBT, and ROI of 406kg, $9195, $631484, 5.18 years, and 17%, respectively, at the selling price of 2 $0.225. The regression models gave R values of 0.9984 for ROI and 0.9920 for PBT, while the production rate was 0.8867. This study shows that a petroleum wastewater bioclarification scale-up design is feasible.