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To: Bikkuri

RO filters can’t handle oil and petroleum.
Not sure anything short of distillation could and then you would need to mineralize the distilled water.


10 posted on 12/04/2021 2:40:06 PM PST by outofsalt (If history teaches us anything, it's that history rarely teaches anything.)
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To: outofsalt

Distillation won’t help for jet fuel range hydrocarbons their evaporation and condensation temperature range cross those of fresh water. Which means you will distill off and condense those range hydrocarbons with the fresh water. Certain types of RO membranes are impervious to hydrocarbons that is what must be used distillation won’t work. The military has RO units capable of cleaning up hydrocarbons contaminated waters we used them overseas when the local water sources were contaminated by a certain dictator who blew his wells up and set the sky on fire.


17 posted on 12/04/2021 3:06:22 PM PST by JD_UTDallas ("Veni Vidi Vici" )
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To: outofsalt
Distillation won't work by itself, it’s more complicated. Ultrafiltration can pretreat higher concentrations of petroleum hydrocarbons and reverse osmosis can further reduce the petroleum hydrocarbon load. That said though, membranes are unlikely to produce potable quality water for drinking. Activated carbon polishing might work to complete the purification. Your looking at big bucks to do this and probably several hundred million $$$ in equipment costs just guessing at the gpm capacity needed.

Just guessing based on prior work…. A possible treatment train for the contaminated groundwater could be UF pretreatment, multieffect evaporation, RO as a third stage and activated carbon for polishing. This is spitballing things. This option would compete with multieffect evaporation of seawater with the groundwater handled as a separate issue to contain plume migration first then to possibly treat the ground water over time to a discharge standard and not potable criteria.

It would probably be cheaper and faster to just switch to seawater desalination for the water supply. There are 3 corporations world wide that I would involve in the phase1 engineering and that would have a seat at the table in competitive bidding. One is a US company, the second European and the third from Israel.

This is the kind of phase 1 process engineering design issue I often worked with to sort through technical and economic issues. Retired now. The goal of this to get sufficient information as quickly possible to enable management decisions. Finally, a preliminary design is produced that feeds into phase 2 detailed engineering. For speed and cost control, you don't want detailed engineering to do much zigzagging.

22 posted on 12/04/2021 6:53:37 PM PST by Hootowl99
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