Pilot study of oilfield wastewater treatment by micro-flocculation filtration process

In order to meet the latest Environmental Protection Law of China on wastewater discharge standards, this paper studied a pilot-scale micro-flocculation filtration pretreatment process for the treatment of oilfield wastewater. The experiment showed that the removal rate of oil and suspended solids (SS) respectively increased from 91.52% to 95.38% and from 66.42% to 97.19%. After the treatment by the micro-flocculation filtration device, the relevant characteristics of the discharge wastewater satisfied the latest standards continuously. Moreover, the polyaluminum chloride (PAC) dosage was reduced from 200 mg/L to 100 mg/L (50 mg/L in micro-flocculation device and 50 mg/L in the cyclone reactor) at the same time. In order to decrease the degree of scaling in the filter, ceramsite was chosen as the filter material instead of quartz sand that is widely applied in the oilfields. The scaling experiment showed that the HCO₃^-, Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ contents in the extract from quartz sand after the scaling study were increased by 38.05, 35.91 and 0.28 mg/L, respectively. Meanwhile, the HCO₃^-, Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ contents in the extract from ceramsite were only increased by 13.14, 6.26 and 0.27 mg/L, respectively. Therefore, the ceramsite is not so prone to scaling as compared to quartz sand under identical test conditions, which avoided a hardened and impervious filter after operating for some time. These results suggest that the micro-flocculation filtration with the ceramsite as filter media is a suitable pretreatment process for the oilfield wastewater treatment.