(684f) Extraction of Essentials from Petroleum Sludge: A Review

Petroleum sludge is a composite mixture containing diverse measure of waste oil, wastewater, sand and mineral matter. Nowadays, handling of such petroleum sludge has become burden on the petroleum industries. The handling of sludge, its treatment, extraction of essentials and the discarding methods are the key matter of concern. It is also a key source of environmental pollution, spaced out from this, the extraction of essentials from the petroleum sludge can be carried out in order to fulfill the fresh oil requirement and evade the wastage of useful materials in form of sludge.

Disposal of sludge is a massive substance of concern as it causes environmental troubles. Sludge when disposed openly on land can lead to soil pollution, also when disposed in water body causes water pollution and harm to marine life. Recycling is the most desirable environmental alternatives for handling oily sludge, due to the possibility of recovering valuable oil for reprocessing, reformulating, or energy recovery. A range of methods which can be used for the separation of essentials from the petroleum sludge are solvent extraction method, centrifugation treatment, surfactant enriched oil recovery method, sludge pyrolysis, microwave irradiation, electro-kinetic method, ultrasonic irradiation and froth floatation method.

There is requirement of proper separation treatment of petroleum sludge before the disposal should be done to the outer world. In the present work, all the various disposal methods including incineration, stabilization or solidification, oxidation treatment and bioremediation was analyzed. The techniques of disposal under bioremediation include land forming, bio pile or composition and bio slurry treatment. The review work leads to the selection of the separation techniques for sludge purification.