Environmental pollution and Petroleum Refining 2

Hazardous Materials
Petroleum refining facilities manufacture, use, and store significant amounts of hazardous materials, including raw materials, intermediate / final products and by-products.
Recommended practices for hazardous material management should be done in all Petroleum refining facilities.

Wastes
Hazardous Wastes: Spent Catalysts
Spent catalysts result from several process units in petroleum refining including the pretreating and catalytic reformer; light and middle distillate hydrodesulphurization; the hydrocracker; fluid catalytic cracking (FCCU); residue catalytic cracking (RCCU); MTBE/ETBE and TAME production; butanes isomerization; the dienes hydrogenation and butylenes hydroisomerization unit; sulfuric acid regeneration; selective catalytic
hydrodesulphurization; and the sulfur and hydrogen plants.
Spent catalysts may contain molybdenum, nickel, cobalt, platinum, palladium, vanadium iron, copper and silica and/or alumina, as carriers.

Other Hazardous Wastes
In addition to spent catalysts, industry hazardous waste may include solvents, filters, mineral spirits, used sweetening, spent amines for CO2, hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and carbonyl sulfide (COS) removal, activated carbon filters and oily sludge from oil / water separators, tank bottoms, and spent or used operational and maintenance fluids (e.g. oils and test liquids). Other hazardous wastes, including contaminated sludges, sludge from jet water pump circuit purification, exhausted molecular sieves, and exhausted alumina from hydrofluoric (HF) alkylation, may be generated from crude oil storage tanks, desalting and topping, coking, propane, propylene, butanes streams dryers, and butanes isomerization.

Process wastes should be tested and classified as hazardous or non-hazardous based on local regulatory requirements or internationally accepted approaches.

Non-hazardous Wastes
Hydrofluoric acid alkylation produces neutralization sludges which may contain calcium fluoride, calcium hydroxide, calcium carbonate, magnesium fluoride, magnesium hydroxide and magnesium carbonate. After drying and compression, they may be marketed for steel mills use or landfilled.









Noise
The principal sources of noise in petroleum refining facilities include large rotating machines, such as compressors and turbines, pumps, electric motors, air coolers (if any), and heaters. During emergency depressurization, high noise levels can be generated due to high pressure gases to flare and/or
steam release into the atmosphere.