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SediLogic Technologies

Industrial pre-treatment

Refinery aeration basin

Floc that would not form reliably in the basin, with the compliance consequence of losing it measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.

$200,000

a day of loss reported as avoided

Field resultNo method stated
Duty
Industrial pre-treatment
Sector
Industrial
Treatment window
Sustained over 4 years
What was counted
Settling
  • Reported as holding for four years
Aboveground steel storage tanks at an industrial facility.
Illustration — aboveground tanks at an industrial site, not the plant described on this page.

01The plant

What was being treated

The aeration basin of a petroleum refinery taking water separated from crude piped in from a rig about three miles offshore, by way of an anaerobic filter and then a conventional activated-sludge stage. Typical flow through the works is 1,800 gallons a minute.

02Before

How the material got there

Compounds arriving in that water were inhibiting the biomass. The basin could not hold an active population much above 1,800 mg/L mixed liquor suspended solids, floc would not form reliably, dissolved oxygen ran low and clarifier performance went with it. Below that range the refinery's oil and grease breach its permit and production has to be slowed, which the plant costs at two hundred thousand dollars a day. Chemical additives had not held it.

03Treatment

What was applied, and how

Two blends dosed together into the aeration basins, one aimed at the hydrocarbon itself and one at building floc and carrying the mixed liquor up to a working concentration. Both went in twice a day through the initial phase.

Every result in this library was measured at an operating plant treating with one of the formulations SediLogic supplies, over the window stated above. It is a field result published as reported, not a controlled trial we ran.

04Sizing

What the quantity was set against

Against mixed liquor suspended solids, not against volume or flow. Dosing ran continuously while the population was being built, and now resumes only when MLSS falls back to a trigger figure; a hydrocarbon spike raises it again until the system recovers. The trigger belongs to that basin and to no other.

05Outcome

What followed

Four years without a production slowdown, on the refinery's own account.

At the start

Mixed liquor struggling above about 1,800 mg/L, floc poor, dissolved oxygen low, clarifier performance compromised.

At the close

Mixed liquor held near 4,000 mg/L, with production running unslowed for four years.

06Limits

What this record does not establish.

Two hundred thousand dollars a day is a loss avoided, not a saving banked — it is what the refinery calculates a slowdown would cost, and no slowdown happened to measure it against. Two products went in at once and neither can be separated from the other. Nothing was left untreated, the refinery is not named, and four years is long enough that crude quality, plant practice and the people running it will all have changed inside it.

Only the volatile organic fraction of a sludge responds to any of this. Grit, sand, silt, mineral precipitates and plastics remain at any dose, here and everywhere else.

What we would supply

For this duty, in our range.

SediLogic Liquid is the article in the range that reaches this — a concentrate for systems a solid cannot be dosed into, which covers most of what sits upstream of an industrial outfall. Where the target is instead an accumulated blanket in a holding basin, the sinking solids are the right format and the lagoon products apply.

SediLogic holds a written dose table for wastewater lagoons and for no other duty. Industrial loads are also the least alike of anything on this site — a rate set for one plant's effluent means very little at the next — so a quantity here is settled with a person, against your own stream.

Read next

The same duty, measured somewhere else.

  • Industrial pre-treatment

    Refinery and petrochemical effluent plant

    IndustrialNot published

    $5,000

    a day reported as recovered

    Field resultConfoundedNo method stated

    Phenol in the feed and filamentous growth in the basin, together costing the plant its settling.

    • Phenol load and filament count both reported as reduced
    Settling
  • Industrial pre-treatment

    Coking plant effluent treatment

    IndustrialWeeks

    29 to 86%

    ammonia removal

    Field resultConfounded

    A nitrifying population that would not establish itself, leaving ammonia removal at less than a third of what the permit assumed.

    • COD removal reported as improved over the same period

    Nitrifying organisms do not survive drying. No product in SediLogic's dry range addresses an ammonia or total-nitrogen permit, and this record is published as part of the field record rather than as an offer.

    Nitrogen and ammoniaBOD and COD
  • Industrial pre-treatment

    Crude refinery, Central America

    Industrial90 days

    68%

    reduction in extractable petroleum hydrocarbons

    Field resultConfounded

    Oily sludge holding extractable petroleum hydrocarbons at a concentration that made disposal the only route available.

    • 29,195 ppm to 9,395 ppm over 90 days
    Hydrocarbons

All field results

Your lagoon next

This was measured somewhere else.

A different plant, a different loading and a different sludge. What decides your result is how much of your own accumulation is organic and treatable, and whether the dose is sized against the lagoon in front of us rather than read off this page. Tell us the dimensions and we will size it.