Reuse and recycling of secondary effluents in refineries employing advanced multi-barrier systems

In this paper the reclamation and reuse of municipal secondary effluents, as well as the reclamation and recycling of refinery secondary effluents, are technically and economically evaluated. It is shown that both practices are feasible and sustainable, and that the reclamation costs depend largely on specific circumstances such as legal requirements, price policy, reuse application, raw water composition, etc. The reclaimed water is reused, or respectively recycled, as boiler make-up. Therefore both reclamation plants employ advanced multi-barrier systems including ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis. The employed processes have shown excellent performance with regard to the removal of critical parameters such as silica. For example, this parameter was reduced from 13 mg/l in the raw water to 7 μg/l in the boiler make-up.