Pitfalls of Wastewater Treatment in Oil Refinery Enterprises in Kazakhstan—A System Approach

Abstract

The present article is an assessment of wastewater treatment processes in the oil refinery sector in Kazakhstan by comparing relevant experience of developed and developing countries. The legislation in this sphere, the treatment methods, the discharge process and the effect on the environment were evaluated following international and national regulations. In our study, the wastewater systems in three factories in Kazakhstan were assessed. Results show that, even though the environmental regulation in Kazakhstan promotes the polluter pays principle and follows the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations, the oil refinery plants in Kazakhstan still contain exceeding concentrations of pollutants in their effluents. One issue is that the local legislation allows disposal of wastewater to natural or artificial ponds as long as the concentrations of pollutants in effluents are less than the already existing concentrations in the pond. Consequently, the factories can use ponds with an initially high concentration of contaminants. The high initial concentration of pollutants in the pond water is due to wastewater discharged before the implementation of current environmental regulations. This issue in the current legislation leads to the situation where there is no incentive for efficient wastewater treatment. The national law also lacks regulations regarding which methodology should be used to assess the pollutants in the wastewater. Thus, the control by national environmental office for each enterprise is negotiated separately between the factory and the governmental body. This gives the factory a strong position to define the parameters assessing the effluents. This has led to none of the factories measuring, e.g., heavy metals in discharged wastewater. Total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) concentration in wastewater is often exceeded at each factory and there is no analysis done for different hydrocarbon fraction. To overcome the issues described in the present study, we strongly recommended a unified and transparent methodology for the country’s oil refinery industry to assess important pollutants in discharged wastewater.

Assessment of groundwater safety surrounding contaminated water storage sites using multivariate statistical analysis and Heckman selection model: a case study of Kazakhstan

“…? is associated with extremally high concentrations of ammonia in discharges (Radelyuk et al 2019). Hence, the amount of ammonia is not degraded during the saturation processes and some traces still presence in the groundwater.…”

“…In Kazakhstan, groundwater withdrawal amounted to 1.078 km 3 in 2016 (UN 2019 ). One crucial problem in the country is toxic wastewater from petrochemical factories (Radelyuk et al 2019 ), a very important factor in Kazakhstani economy. The oil refinery industry is represented by three large factories, and their capacity is estimated to be 360 thousand barrels daily with an annual growth of 2.9% (BP 2018 ).…”

Wastewater purification technology by two­stage treatment in electrical device of a compact local installation

“…One of the main factors of environmental pollution and environmental safety is the discharge of wastewater into natural water resources, as they contain hazardous components. Very often, the main pollutants of both natural water bodies and soil [1,2] are petroleum products (a group of hydrocarbons of oil, fuel oil, kerosene, oil and their impurities). Through their high toxicity by international standards, they are among the ten most dangerous components of environmental pollution.…”

Utilization plants in energy and water supply systems of oil and gas enterprises

“…To date, various technologies and methods for treating wastewater and minimizing waste are known [19 -26], the implementation of which in appropriate equipment can reduce water consumption from external sources of both technological productions of OGE's [19,23,27] and recycled water supply systems [21,27]. However, to increase energy efficiency OGE's and create resource-saving energy-technological complexes with practically closed utilization cycles, it is necessary to take into account the trends of the following influencing factors: thermobaric parameters and composition of OGCRM; production nomenclature; operating modes of equipment; environmental-climatic conditions; environmental-climatic conditions; technicaleconomic characteristics.…”