Tecnologia eletroquímica aplicada na degradação de poluentes da indústria de petróleo.

Abstract

The presence of water associated to the oil provokes a series of problems in the production, transport and refining stages. In the transport and production stages the greatest inconvenient are the necessity of supersizing the collection of installations, storage and oil/water transfer. Here are included pumps, tubings, tanks, etc., beyond the biggest energy consumption and operational security. In virtue of its composition (suspended material, microorganism, salts and dissolved gases). The water production may suffer temperature and pressure variation, to provoke corrosion and/or incrustation problems, causing damages to the tubings, equipment and accessories (valves, instruments, etc.) being able to result in human and/or environmental damages. In the extraction and refinement of oil process, for example, the generated effluent presents high concentration of sulphide, N-ammoniacal, phenols, oil and greases. All these compounds are highly harmful to the environment and need treatment before the discharging in order to fit itself to environmental norms and did not cause damages to the environment. The electrochemical processes possess a great potential in effluents treatment due to the reduced time of treatment, small area of installation when compared to the conventional processes beyond the possibility to be associates to other processes such as before and posttreatment effluent, and they do not demand, in general way chemical reagents. The main objective of the present work is the application of the electrochemical technology in the oxidation of pollutants coming from the production/refining process of oil industry, for this purpose, was studied and developed an electrochemical reactor that can operate with efficiency in the electro-oxidation process. Moreover, the work approaches the study of the incrustation in the electrodes, which the same which causes the greatest decreasing in the electro-oxidation process efficiency. The reactor used in this study was following dependent parameters had been analyzed: salinity (mg/L), electric potential (V), volumetric flow rate (l/h) and electrolysis time (h). As efficiency indicators the following independent parameters had been analyzed: sulphide removal, N-ammoniacal and phenol percentage and relative index of incrustation. After analysis of all results mode with the synthetic effluent had been able to be established the conditions limits for the parameters (dependents) to be studied in the processing with the real effluent of the Industrial GuamaréPolo/RN and that they had presented the best results. The best operational conditions for the entrance variables had been: volumetric flow rate of 380 l/h, electric potential of 4 V and electrolysis time of 0,29 h. The sulphide removal percentage was evaluated in the form of concentration profile, and according to the expectation the removal was around 100 %. The phenol removal was around 100%, for the total electrolysis time that was of 2 hours. With this purpose of evaluating the incrustation level in the electrodes that also was one of the aims of our research, was carried out physical-chemistry analysis of alkalinity and hardness in CaCO3, incrustation index for chronoamperometric technique and scanning electronic microscopy of the electrodes.