Elsevier

Chemosphere

Volume 282, November 2021, 131002
Chemosphere

Effectiveness of sodium sulfite as an electron acceptor for bioenhanced treatment of salt-containing water produced from ASP flooding

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.131002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Salt-containing water produced from ASP flooding can be effectively treated.

  • The oil content in the treated sewage can reach the reinjection standard.

  • Changes in the organic compound types were analyzed during the treatment.

  • The dominant bacterial genus was Halomonas.

Abstract

The wastewater produced from alkaline-surfactant-polymer (ASP) flooding is a complex multiphase mixture that contains oil, polymers, surfactants and other pollutants and is thus a salt-containing industrial waste recalcitrant to treatments. Through laboratory tests, this study assessed the effectiveness of using sodium sulfite as an electron acceptor for a modified anaerobic baffled reactor (ABR) for removing oil, suspended solids, polymers and surfactants from salt-containing wastewater produced from ASP flooding. During the 90-day operation, the method established in this study successively removed 52.8%, 98.6%, 77.0%, 21.2% and 21.5% of the chemical oxygen demand (COD), oil, suspended solids, polymers and surfactants, respectively, from the wastewater. The changes in organic compounds in the reactor during the treatment were monitored through gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and the results showed that the established method was very effective in removing alkanes, alkenes, cycloalkanes, aromatic hydrocarbons and esters, and the organic macromolecules in the wastewater were degraded to small molecules. The main bacterial species and microbial communities in the reactor were characterized using molecular biological techniques, and the results indicated that under the stress of high pH and salts, Halomonas sp. gradually dominated and played a major role in degrading hydrocarbons. The findings of this study can aid the development of a cost-effective biological system to treat the water produced from ASP flooding.

Introduction

Alkaline-surfactant-polymer (ASP) flooding refers to an oil recovery technology that uses the synergistic effect of three components, i.e., alkali, surfactant and polymer, to increase oil recovery by improving displacement and sweep efficiency (Li et al. 2016, 2019; Olajire, 2014; Wang et al., 2019a). In recent years, ASP flooding has attracted widespread attention due to its advantages in improving oilfield recovery (Tackie-Otoo et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2016) and has been tested in China (Yu et al., 2019) India (Mahendra and Gauma, 2004), Canada (Charest, 2013) and other counties (Liu et al., 2020b). Currently, it has been applied in Daqing Oil Field in China at a large scale. With the development of petroleum industry, the environmental problems caused by industrial sewage cannot be ignored (Ferraa et al., 2021; Hsini et al., 2021). To maintain the sustainable development of the oil industry, the treatment and discharge of oilfield-produced water has always been the focus of the oilfield industry (Jiménez et al., 2019; Olajire, 2020; Zhu et al., 2018). The presence of alkalis, surfactants and polymers in the water from ASP flooding makes the wastewater very stable and thus more difficult to treat (Wang et al., 2011; Wu et al., 2021).

In China, the treated wastewater is recycled as flooding water and reinjected underground (Liang et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2016a), which not only reduces the harm to the environment but also conserves clean water resources. According to the standards of oilfield reinjection water in China, the goal of oilfield wastewater treatment is to remove crude oil and suspended solids (Zhang et al., 2020). The research and application of oilfield wastewater treatment have been mainly focused on physical, chemical and physicochemical methods, including coalescence separation (Lu et al., 2019), air floatation (Wang et al., 2019a), membrane filtration (Zhang et al., 2020), Fenton/Fenton-like process (Zhang et al., 2019), ozone oxidation (Jiménez et al., 2019), photocatalytic (Alias et al., 2020), electrochemical (Wang et al., 2018) other technologies. However, these methods inevitably have some problems, such as physical methods can't remove polymers from water, chemical methods have higher costs, and physicochemical methods have higher equipment and operation costs (Li et al., 2021).

In recent years, with the development of biodegradation technology, biological treatments have been widely used in the treatment of various kinds of wastewater due to their economic and environmental benefits (Lusinier et al., 2019). Moreover, these methods are simple to use. Currently, investigators are more interested in improving the efficiency of oilfield wastewater treatment by using various microorganisms. It has been found that microorganisms can be used to treat oilfield produced water (Nie et al., 2020; Zare et al., 2019) and are very effective in terms of indicators, such as oil content, suspended solids content and organic compounds. The water from ASP flooding is an industrial wastewater with high salinity, which leads to high osmotic pressure that causes changes in microbial metabolism that severely inhibit microbes in the biological treatment process (Cortés-Lorenzo et al., 2014; Zhao et al., 2013) and thus present a great challenge to the wastewater treatment process (Zhang et al., 2016b). In addition, petrochemical wastewater contains aromatic hydrocarbons, aliphatic hydrocarbons, chlorinated hydrocarbons, and other refractory organics and has the characteristic of a low five-day biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5)/chemical oxygen demand (COD), which complicates biological treatment (Ahmadi et al., 2017). Microorganisms can use sulfate as the electron acceptor to carry out anaerobic degradation of hydrocarbons (Wartell et al., 2021). Studies have shown that the addition of sulfate can enhance anaerobic degradation of petroleum hydrocarbons through sulfate reduction mechanisms (Hsia et al., 2021).

This study increased the salinity of the influent by adding sodium chloride to investigate the adaptability of the modified anaerobic baffled reactor (ABR) to the treatment of water from ASP flooding using sodium sulfite as an electron acceptor under high salinity, and the results demonstrated that the treatment was effective as expected through the analysis of chemical oxygen demand (COD), oil content and other indicators. Meanwhile, changes in organic compounds during the treatment process were monitored through gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Moreover, high-throughput sequencing analysis was performed to examine the changes in the microbial community during the treatment process.

Section snippets

Reactor setup and operation

First, the traditional ABR was modified by replacing the activated sludge with polyurethane filler (2 × 2 × 2 cm, with a filling rate of 50%) in each compartment of the reactor to provide for a place for enrichment of microbial communities, and these microbial communities, which perform its activities, can improve the treatment efficiency of the reactor. In addition, the extracellular matrix secreted by the biofilm formed on the filler strengthens the diffusion barrier and limits the contact

Reactor performance

In this study, the laboratory-scale modified ABR was operated for 90 days (Days 0–30: initiation phase; Days 31–90: steady operation phase). The changes in salinity during the entire operation are shown in Fig. 2, and the salinity of the influent varied in the range of 14,200–15,900 mg L−1. To examine the performance of the modified ABR in treating the salt-containing wastewater produced from ASP flooding, the polymers, viscosity, oil content, suspended solids, COD and surfactants were

Conclusions

This study found that through bioenhancement with sodium sulfite in a modified ABR for treating salt-containing wastewater produced from ASP flooding, the average removal rates of COD, oil, suspended solids, polymers and surfactants were 52.8%, 98.6%, 77.0%, 21.2% and 21.5%, respectively. In the treated effluent, the oil content met the reinjection standard while suspended solids still need further simple treatments (e.g., filtration with sand). The GC-MS analysis of the organic compounds from

Credit author statement

Zhang X.: Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing- Original draft preparation. Wei D.: Methodology, Investigation, Validation. Li C.: Project administration, Supervision. Wei L.: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Writing- Reviewing and Editing. Zhao M.: Conceptualization, Supervision, Project administration.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the 2019 Guangzhou Municipal Program for International Science and Technology Collaboration (Grant No. 201907010005), the 2019 Foshan-The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Research Cooperation Project (Grant No. FSUST19-FYTRI03), the Guangdong–Hong Kong Collaborative Innovation Project of the Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology Program (Grant No. 2020A050515011), the Basic and Applied Basic Research Project of the Guangzhou Municipal Science and

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