USING MICROWAVE TECHNIQUE TO TREAT CONTAMINATED DRILL CUTTINGS

Ahmed Ameen Khudhair ,Ayad A Alhaleem

doi:10.46717/igj.53.2d.3ms-2020.10-25

Abstract

Drilling waste is a vital and persistent problem found in the petroleum industry which is mainly related to drilling and oil production. When drilling fluids ruminants are discharged on the ground, human health is affected by the toxic of oil contamination and the chemicals of liquid fraction ruin organisms functional and contaminate the groundwater as a result of seeping. A microwave technique was used to treat the remain drill cuttings resulting from drilling fluid. Whereas amounts of drill cuttings were taken from the southern Rumaila oilfields, prepared for testing and fixed with 100 gm per sample and contaminated with two types of crude oil, one from the southern Rumaila oilfields with Specific gravity of 0.882 and the other crude oil from the eastern Baghdad oilfield of Specific gravity 0.924. The concentrations of 7.5%, 10%, 12.5% and 15% w/w in mass was chosen to be the pollution percentage. Samples were treated in the microwave with different power applied of 180, 540, and 900 watt and a time period of 50 minutes is divided into 5 parts for analysis 0, 10, 20, 30 and 50 min. the purpose of this study was trying to reach the zero-discharge concept treatment or near. It was found that the results of 22 sample reached below 1% w/w in mass, except for two samples of 180-watt power applied and oil contamination of 15% w/w in mass they reached about 1.5-1% w/w in mass. The results show a great declination in oil contamination even with highest pollution with lower power applied.

Highlights

Waste disposal operations from the oil and gas industry, unexpected accident leakage, or improperly disposing of drilling waste, have quite serious consequences for the human health and the environment in general
When contaminated drill cuttings are removed with the remains drilling fluids, especially with oil-based mud (OBM), the chemical fractions of liquids begin to
The US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) stated that discharged cuttings cannot be greater than 6.9% by mass for the organic pollution of synthetic fluid adhered (Santos et al, 2018)

Summary

Introduction

Waste disposal operations from the oil and gas industry, unexpected accident leakage, or improperly disposing of drilling waste, have quite serious consequences for the human health and the environment in general. Land reclamation is a regularly utilized bioremediation strategy in which the oil-contaminated drill cuttings are applied to the land where evaporation synchronically with the natural organisms of the soil combine to diminish the pollution of the waste (Zimmerman and Robert, 1991), (Chaineau et al, 1996). Among of these ways, microwave drying is one of the modern technologies used industrially and at home, which showed effective results in its practical applications and brought about an ever-increasing change in relation to drying various materials (Omran et al, 2014). The approach used in this study tries to reach zero discharge concept or close, for oil contamination in drilling waste of Rumaila oilfield, by using microwave treatment technique

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Conclusion