Anaerobic Treatment of Petrolenm Refinery Wastewater Using UASB Reactor: Kinetic Analysis

Petroleum refineries are complex plants, and the combination and sequence of
processes is usually very specific to the characteristics of the raw materials (crude
oil) and the products. This industry generates wastewater effiuent containing oil,
ammonia, sulphides, chlorides, phenols and other hydrocarbons. The most important
pollutants are organics, oils, suspended solids and other toxic materials referred to as
priority pollutants which be considered hazardous. Accidental discharges of large
quantities of pollutants can occur as a result of abnormal operation in a refinery and
potentially pose a major local environmental hazard. Previous studies have shown
the reasonable performance of biological systems in refinery wastewater treatment.
Thus, in this study an Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (UASB) was studied for
treatment of wastewater from PETRONAS Penapisan Terengganu Sdn. Bhd.
(PPTSB) at Kerteh, Terengganu. There are two reactors; A and B with total effective
volume of 2.4 L for each reactor which were setup in parallel. Wastewater was
continuously fed into the UASB reactors using a variable-speed peristaltic pump and
seeded with the anaerobic sludge from a local Palm Oil Mill Effiuent (POME)
anaerobic treatment plant. The steady state performance was evaluated under
flowrate is 1.4 Lid and hydraulic retention time of l. 7 days. Both reactors were
operated with different Volumetric Organic Loading Rate (VOLR) which was four in
total in order to determine the optimum empirical parameters that lead to most
efficient anaerobic treatment of petroleum refinery wastewater. Therefore, the kinetic
analysis was used to analyze all the data gained from all the experiments conducted.
The results show that the kinetic constant, K of Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD)
data is 2.18 d· 1
• From the simulation, this research also found out that kinetic analysis
give significant contribution.