In the United States, no major refinery has been built since Marathon’s Garyville, LA, facility in 1976. Though many existing refineries have been expanded, there’s been pressure to prevent new refineries from being developed. With an ever-increasing need for petroleum products, and little new construction in recent decades, refineries operating today must make do with what’s out there when it comes to wastewater treatment systems. Though refineries have been in existence for over a century, solutions for taking care of the sludge their lagoons have accumulated are quite new. Biolynceus LLC, a Lyons, CO, biological solutions firm, has helped a handful of the western region’s aging oil refineries, using customized bioremediation products.
Ciniza Refinery
Giant Industries’ Ciniza Oil Refinery near Gallup, NM, has been on this site since 1957. This refinery treats an average of 80 gallons of wastewater per minute or 115,200 gallons per day. According to Steve Morris, environmental engineer, the site had never been physically remediated or dredged. Its No. 1 active biological treatment unit (ABTU) was a 20-foot-deep lagoon with a great deal of sludge built up in it.
“Refinery buildup had just been gathering and compacting over the years, so we were basically working on 47 years of accumulation. The aerators themselves were keeping the very top liquid soft, while the naturally occurring microbes without any help were maintaining that 2 feet of water and 2 feet of soft material,” says Morris.
Morris did some calculations on the costs of removing the deep sludge from the lagoons mechanically, evaluating what would have to be done if some of the wastes were hazardous. What he found was that the costs for physical removal of the sludge would have totaled over $2 million. “The cost of the Biolynceus product we ended up using was not very much compared to that,” says Morris.
Before the Ciniza refinery started using Biolynceus’ BioScrubber in its aeration lagoon, it measured the water depth and found that a piece of clear, capped PVC pipe could be pressed into 2 feet of water and 2 feet of soft material in the 15-foot-deep lagoons.
“After the first year when we went out to check again, after the application of the product, to my astonishment we had 4 feet of water and 4 feet of soft material; this was very significant, and the only change we’d made was the addition of the BioScrubber.”
In the second year, when Morris went out in the boat used for taking depth samples in the lagoon, he could not reach anything but water at the bottom of his 10-foot PVC pipe, nicknamed the “sludge judge.” The microbes had at least doubled again what they’d done the first year.
Morris says in the near future they may put the BioScrubber product to use downstream in a pond containing some black sludge buildup. For the long term they’ll stick with the microbes because they’ve worked.
Rick Allen, Biolynceus president and owner, began looking at the problems of two Giant Industries oil refineries in northern New Mexico in 1997. Giant’s Ciniza refinery was the first his company worked with, but Allen was confident that he could do it. “We put together a program for them. The work started out as purely experimental; this was new territory for both of us. The cost for Giant Industries was still substantial, but it was considerably less than a half million dollars,” says Allen.
They decided to start by doing a pilot project, which removed about two feet of sludge within the first six months.
Environmental challenges fuels Allen’s enthusiasm for his work, whether it’s wastewater, dairies, revegetation with something such as mine tailings, or anything that deals with cleaning up the environment. “That has been our main focus since we started up the company in 1994,” says Allen.
“We take nature and speed up the process to get it working faster and better and help industry discharge fewer contaminants. By cleaning up their sludges using microbials instead of dredging, they don’t have to haul them off to the landfill. We can do it all onsite.”
Biolynceus has been effective in taking care of everything Giant Industries has been placing in its lagoons over the last nine years they’ve been working together, says Allen. “All industrial waste systems contain solids that move through those systems. When they reach lagoons, those solids will settle out in the bottom, and a buildup of sludge develops over time. It comes down to the fact that you can either deal with the problem now or dredge out the sludge later, at a much greater expense; if a particular industry has three or four ponds, that can be quite expensive.”
Bloomfield Refinery
Giant Industries’ Bloomfield oil refinery in northwestern New Mexico was also facing a sludge buildup of 3 to 4 feet that was reducing its aeration lagoon’s capacity and retention time by a significant amount, according to Cindy Hurtado, manager with Giant Industries.
Both Giant Industries refineries produce gasoline and diesel fuels. The Bloomfield refinery is about the same size as the one in Ciniza. Both have three ABTUs, or aerated ponds. They also have a series of evaporation ponds receiving discharge from the aerated ponds. The aerated ponds are the ones that build up the most sludge, with the first pond in the series being the worst because it tends to catch the most material. Everything flows to the first pond; a little bit of flow goes to the second pond, and as that pond overflows it discharges into the third pond, which contains even less material.
“The sludge was building in our lagoons,” says Hurtado. “The other alternative to Biolynceus was to take each lagoon out of service, drain it, and then physically remove and properly dispose of the sludge. This would have been an extremely costly project. There was also the risk of damaging the lagoon liners during cleanout. Using the biological solutions was definitely a win-win situation.”
The blend of product over the years has been tweaked to the point where only about half of the material is being added to the pond at Ciniza, compared to 1997. “The effectiveness of the product has been improving to the point where we don’t use nearly as much as we used to. Part of it is due to improvement with our product, and part of it is from that fact that Bloomfield’s system is somewhat unique. It features waste flow coming from other areas besides the refinery. We are able to change some of the requirement for that particular system,” says Allen.
Being in the high desert does not really change conditions for Biolynceus. It handles refinery waste in Montana, Hawaii, and other places; the climate does not have much bearing on what the company does to the wastewater. “Refinery waste already has a lot of heat within it in the first place; wastewater coming out of this refinery is typically 100 degrees and in some cases even higher than that,” says Allen.
The biggest challenge in starting this project was simply proving that the product worked. Getting the mixes correct for these particular refineries was also a difficult task.
“We always knew we had the microbials to do this project,” says Allen. “It was just a matter of getting them in the right populations and getting the amount of product regulated to the point that we wanted to reach. We’ve been very successful in getting that done.”
One problem all refineries must constantly contend with is huge swings in the pH of their wastewater systems. Those can be highly detrimental to microbial organisms—even within a 24-hour period.
“What we’ve been able to do is inject material that, while it won’t stop the pH swings, will actually buffer the effects of them on the microbial populations,” says Allen. “That treatment—a patented buffering material—has enabled us to not lose as many microbes as before.”
The company custom-blends its products for each individual refinery. At present it is working on blends for five different refineries. None of those refineries have exactly the same product blend, according to Allen.
The blending of all of the company’s products takes place in Phoenix, AZ, by a company called Global Organics. “I determine what products I want in the mix we are going to inject into the system,” says Allen. “Sometimes it can be one product; sometimes it can be four or five. Our company in Arizona has worked out really well for us.”
The last time Biolynceus tested ABTU No. 3 at the Bloomfield refinery, no sludge at all was found in the lagoon. “They have also abandoned their evaporation ponds in Bloomfield,” says Allen. “They have a permit to discharge directly from the ABTU No. 3 now without having to use their evaporation ponds. The effluent coming out of that lagoon is clean enough that it does not need treatment any longer. It can now be injected straight into their wells.”
When Biolynceus started working with the Bloomfield refinery in 2000, it inoculated the lagoons with the products by spraying them on the surface of the lagoons with a pressure washer. Hurtado recalls that Allen recommended a specific dosage. “We were able to adjust the sprayer accordingly,” says Hurtado. “A 250-gallon vat and injection pump was set up at the inlet of our API separator to accommodate injecting the product into the process wastestream.
“We originally started at a fairly high injection rate of 4 gallons per day and then tapered off to 3 gallons per day after several weeks. Currently we use about 250 gallons of the product every 3 months.”
With time the Bloomfield refinery learned to fine-tune things. “Our bug injection rate can fluctuate according to the operation of the refinery,” says Hurtado. “For instance if there is plant maintenance taking place that could increase the load on our API separator; we will increase the injection rate by a gallon or two per day for a period of time.”
Bloomfield had one glitch with a false fire alarm, according to Allen. All its foam equipment went off and hit the lagoon system. This had a somewhat detrimental effect on the ABTUs.
“What foam does is take all the oxygen away from a system,” says Allen. “Luckily we were able to get the system reactivated very quickly, within a week or so, after this incident.”
Another challenge with the Bloomfield refinery was that the product had to be placed into the system ahead of the API separator. Allen was concerned that since the API separator has very high temperatures, the microbes would not survive. “In actuality they’ve survived very well in there and have actually had some effect in removing sludge from the API also,” says Allen. “What we discovered was that our microbes are very tolerant of temperature swings.”
“It was an important discovery for us that the ‘bugs’ do not handle oxygen very well,” says Hurtado. “Our facility’s release of the fire-fighting foam at the terminals loading rack caused some problems. The release was contained, though, and then sent through the process sewer to the API separator and into the lagoons. The fire-fighting foam smothered our bugs. We had to re-inoculate the lagoons.”
“I wouldn’t call this a project that’s ever really completed; it’s ongoing. The blend of product that Biolynceus places in the refineries’ systems is constantly being tweaked. As things are seen in the lagoon systems, either more or less of some substance must be placed in the system. We are constantly injecting the bugs into our system,” says Allen. “In the beginning, Biolynceus did site visits on a regular basis. Now, site visits only occur on an annual basis. The refineries seem to be working very well, but if someone should have a problem we will get someone onsite as quickly as possible to analyze what’s going on and to fix it as soon as possible. We don’t feel we can work out problems over the phone. I do almost all the site
visits myself.”
Presently, the main industrial work for Biolynceus involves oil refineries. But it can work with many types of other industrial waste as well. “We literally will travel all over the world to do industrial work,” says Allen. “But refineries are refineries whether they’re here or in England, Europe, or wherever. Still, all refineries are different, even if they’re owned by the same company. The fact that they have different waste systems makes our challenges greater. The product mix that we use in Gallup is different than the one we use in Bloomfield.”
It is a constant balancing act the way Allen sees it. He feels that eventually they will arrive at a standard blend for a particular refinery. “But again, the wastestream is constantly changing and changing itself on a regular basis.”
At other times it depends on what the objective is, such as whether it’s just sludge removal versus odor control. In addition to odor control, algae control is another problem for some of these systems. If Biolynceus tries to control algae, control odor, or remove sludge, it finds that each of those requires different microbial blends. “Every system really is different,” says Allen. “It depends upon what their desires are. We then try to match a product to meet the desired results.”
Montana Refinery
Biolynceus has worked with another oil refinery in south central Montana, using its BioScrubber product, for a year now. The refinery dates to the early 1900s. Mechanical remediation, including excavation and relining, with subsequent sludge buildup, helped push the refinery in the direction of trying out bioremediation.
Each lagoon is roughly 125 feet by 400 feet. They sit one quarter of a mile from the refinery. The microbes are injected on the refinery side of the lagoons, just beyond the API separator. Because the Montana system is anaerobic, the microbes are injected directly into the line at a rate of one and a half gallons per day. That volume of injection is based on the number of barrels of oil processed per day.
“This cleans out the line from the point of injection to the lagoon, giving the microbes more time to work on the sludge,” says Mark Sembach, environmental consultant with Biolynceus. “It only stays about 48 hours in that entire system.” Sembach set up a grid pattern to ensure greater repeat sampling accuracy. He divided the lagoons into areas of 25 feet by 100 feet by spraying red paint marks on their sides. Samples were then taken at each intersection of the grid.
When the second sampling was taken in May 2006, the results showed the north lagoon had decreased in heavy sludge and increased in the more suspended sludges. “In other words the microbes had started to digest those heavy sludges on the bottom,” says Sembach. “The microbes had created lighter sludges, which created more of a surface area for the microbes to act on and digest.”
In the initial sludge judging that Sembach had performed on the south lagoon, he noted 22 inches of light suspended sludges. When sludges were evaluated five months later the amount of light suspended sludges decreased to 5 inches. “We’d found the right balance of microbes and product to be use in this particular situation,” says Sembach. “What I noticed the last time I sludge-judged the south lagoon was that the average depth had gone up by quite a bit; there were basically a lot more light suspended sludges.”
The water from the refinery goes into the north lagoon, passing from there into the south lagoon before finally flowing into a river after about 48 hours. “The lighter sludge that we loosened up in the north lagoon migrated in the pipe into the south lagoon. Now that we’ve resumed treatment, I fully expect everything in the south lagoon to be digested, thus loosening more heavy stuff in the north lagoon, and that cycle will just continue on,” says Sembach.
“Early on my biggest challenge was the wind. With my first sampling in August 2005, it took me over five hours to do both lagoons; it took us under two hours the next time, as there was no wind.”
Despite the fact that the company chose not to use the product over the winter, it is still going to use the product for the next two years. The company will have the option to use the BioScrubber during the winter, too.
Sembach echoes the thoughts of Allen and others in finding that each refinery is similar but also unique in its needs. “This refinery had an increase in pH and algae count when we first added our microbes; that has to be expected,” says Sembach. “When new microbes are introduced you get something of a war going on. But when everything settles, I’ve never seen our microbes lose! Things get balanced out fine.”
Pete Hildebrandt is a writer specializing in science and engineering topics.
OW - September/October 2006 |
