A review of treating oily wastewater

Petroleum refining unavoidably generates large volumes of oily wastewater. The environmentally acceptable disposal of oily wastewater is a current challenge to the petroleum industry. Nowadays, more attention has been focused on the treatment techniques of oily wastewater. Therefore, oily wastewater treatment has become an urgent problem, and it must be explored and resolved by every oilfield and petroleum company. The development status of treatment methods was summarized from six aspects, which contains flotation, coagulation, biological treatment, membrane separation technology, combined technology and advanced oxidation process. Finally, the development and prospect of treating oily wastewater was predicted. (C) 2013 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University.