Oil Industry Wastewater Treatment with Fouling Resistant Membranes Containing Amphiphilic Comb Copolymers

The oil industry produces large volumes of wastewater, including oil well produced water brought to the surface during oil drilling, and refinery wastewater. These streams are difficult to treat due to large concentrations of oil. Ultrafiltration (UF) is very promising for their treatment to remove oil, but has been limited by economic obstacles due to severe membrane fouling. In a recent study, novel UF membranes incorporating the amphiphilic comb copolymer additive polyacrylonitrile-graft-poly(ethylene oxide), PAN-g-PEO, were found to exhibit complete resistance to irreversible fouling by several classes of organic foulants (J. Membr. Sci. 2007, 298, 136-146). The current work focuses on application of these novel UF membranes to the treatment of oily wastewater feed streams, employing three industrial samples of oil well produced water and refinery wastewater. UF membranes cast with 20 wt % PAN-g-PEO in PAN achieved removals of dispersed and free oils of over 96% based on chemical oxygen demand (COD) for produced water samples, comparable to a PAN UF commercial membrane control. For refinery wastewater treatment the COD removal values were substantially lower, between 41 and 44%, due to higher contents of dissolved organics. Comb copolymer modified membranes showed significantly better fouling resistance than controls, recovering fully their initial fluxes after a simulated backwash for each of the three wastewater samples tested. The results indicate that UF membranes incorporating PAN-g-PEO can be cleaned completely by physical methods alone, which should extend membrane lifetimes substantially and improve the process economics for treatment of oil-contaminated waters.