Innovative Techniques for Effluent Treatment for Specific Pollutants

Report no. 6/25: This report identifies twenty-seven (27) innovative techniques to treat a selected list of organics substances, inorganic substances and heavy metals, based on a literature review, consultation with Concawe member companies and waste water treatment equipment suppliers and vendors. Some of these have Best Available Techniques (BAT)- Associated Emission Levels (AELs), while others are listed in the Refinery Reference document (REF BREF) but have no BAT-AELs in the current BAT conclusions of the REF BREF. This report provides a description of each technique, the substances targeted by each technique, their efficiencies and their main advantages and disadvantages, as well as an evaluation of their level of maturity in its application in industry and capital and operational costs. A smaller number of techniques were then selected based on their maturity and commercial availability for which their environmental footprint and cross media effects were assessed and overall capital and operational costs identified. These techniques may be considered for further testing to gain a better understanding of their applicability to a fuel manufacturing effluent. A main conclusion of this study is that high TRLs for techniques applied to a specific sector or to several sectors do not necessarily translate into a similar level of application to the fuel manufacturing wastewaters in terms of their efficiencies, costs, and general applicability. Such techniques will need to be tested in an operational environment to assess such applicability.