The Indian refineries process crude to produce millions of tons of petroleum and petroleum products. Every production industry produces by-products or waste which needs to be handled and disposed of diligently without causing any environmental hazards. When we talk about petroleum waste storage, the main concerns are the hazard caused by evaporation to the atmosphere, seepage into the water table and contamination of soil.
The petroleum refineries produce a few thousand Kilo Litres of waste oil / contaminated petroleum products every year. This waste oil is usually stored in artificially built lagoons or drums. A leachate system in the lagoons recovers oil to some extent at a very slow pace and therefore not very efficient. The concrete lagoons have a limited capacity. In the event of an emergency of heavy oil spills, there may not be enough free volume in the lagoons to store the waste oil. Similarly, in the event of heavy rainfall, the lagoons are likely to overflow thereby creating another emergency. These events have already been witnessed by a few refineries in India.
Owing to stringent laws from the Pollution Control Boards across India, the Indian Refineries are now denied the storage of waste sludge inside the refinery premises.
The technologies provided by LMR Oils Pvt. Ltd. can take the sludge from the lagoons, pits, storage area, drums, etc and process the same to recover oil and separate the solids and water. The technology can recover up to 90% of the oil having commercial value and return the same to the refinery.
LMR has meticulously studied the various wastes and devised the following ways of waste treatment and management:
- Recovery of Bitumen from waste.
- Recovery of oil using the Thermal Desorption Unit (TDU).
- Sludge/waste oil processing to recover oil from lagoons, pits, drums, etc.
- Industrial Tank Cleaning and Sludge processing.