MICROCLEANMUD · Microwave Cleaning of Drilling Mud and Oil Containing Hazardous Waste

Currently around 70 oil and gas exploration/production rigs drill in the North Sea and approximately 240 floating drilling rigs operate in the global industry. Totally there are several thousand drilling rigs where approximately 2400 rigs drilling for oil and natural gas in North America. Drilling processes are lubricated by a viscous oil/water invert emulsion known as drilling mud. Although Water Based Muds, (WBM), mostly are used in the top hole sections, down in the drilling/bore holes where temperatures can reach 200ºC, the mud used is still Oil Based Muds,( OBM) (mixture of 45% oil, 45% water and additives) or Synthetic Based Muds (SBM). The waste from the drilling process is a heavy sludge of rock, clay, sand and drilling mud (oil and brine). In 2004 the total amount cuttings from OBM and SBM generated on the Norwegian Shelf was nearly 250 000 tonnes cuttings and 45 000 tonnes drilling oil brought onshore. Recent operations in sensitive regions in the Barents sea even requires that WBM cannot be dumped and must be treated on-shore. From 2003 and onwards Western European countries are expected to spend on average between 0.5% to 1.5% of GDP on soil remediation in primarily the agricultural sector, industrial plants, land development and municipalities. In Western Europe there are more than 600,000 contaminated sites with a market of about € 50 billion p.a. A threshold of 0.1% Oil Content (OC) on landfill for drilling muds was established by the EU Revised European Waste Catalogue of 2002. This requires development of new technology to meet the requirements in a cost efficient manner as current state of the art solutions are either cost prohibitive or do not meet the requirements. Our proposed project aims to help cleaning up drilling waste and land contamination at an attractive cost while meeting the 0.1% OC requirement. To achieve this we will develop an innovative, efficient and compact 2-stage microwave process line to fit in a 40 feet container.