Considerable amount of oily waste is generated from petroleum refinery in Malaysia. A typical refinery produces about 40 tons of sludge per month. Disposing via land filling (common method) is becoming less accepted and more expensive. As a result, refineries and other facilities have accumulated large volumes of this waste in makeshift landfills or other storage areas. For this reason solvent extraction method has been selected for oil recovery and to minimize the solid waste. Three solvents (chloroform, MEK, and n-hexane) and two extraction methods (sludge–solvent mixing method , and Soxhlet apparatus) were applied to recover the oil from the refinery sludge. Soxhlet extraction method has shown higher efficiency in extraction than sludge-solvent mixing method. Soxhlet extraction method using MEK solvent can recover about 48.3 % of oil, as compared to mixing method which accounts to only about 32.5 % of recovered oil. It has an added recovery of about 7.1 %, 15.8 % and 5.7 % for n-hexane, MEK and chloroform solvents respectively. FTIR results confirmed that MEK has the highest capability to extract hydrocarbon from refinery waste. |
