Implementation of a Process for the Treatment of Hydrocarbon-Contaminated Soil Using Petroleum Produced Water

Oil-pipeline, oil-well accidents, and leaky underground storage oil-tanks can all permanently contaminate massive areas of soil making them economically useless as well as dangerous to human health, biological resources, and ecosystems. There are many methods to treat of the soils contaminated by hydrocarbons Stegmann R., Brunner G., Calmano W., Matz G.: Treatment of contaminated soil, Fondamentals Analysis Applications. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 658 p. (2001): stabilization/solidification, bioremediation Suthersan, S. S., Horst J., Schnobrich M., Welty N. and McDonough J. Remediation engineering: design concepts, CRC Press. (2016), incineration, soil washing, etc. The present work focuses on the treatment of the soil contaminated by hydrocarbons with soil washing process using oilfield produced water (PW). The methodological approach consists of researching the optimum conditions of soil washing based on the optimum moisture parameters between PW and contaminated soil such as liquid/solid contact time and liquid/solid ratio. Another parameter was analyzed is the successive wash test. The contaminated soil before applying the treatment has 1900 ppm of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH). After six washing tests, the optimum parameters of test were as follow: the optimum of liquid/solid contact time was 5 min, and the optimum of liquid/solid ratio was 100 mL/100 g. With these optimum conditions and after three successive soil washing, we managed to reduce the percentage of residual TPH in contaminated soil from 0.19% (1900 ppm) to 0.03% (300 ppm).