Photo-Catalytic Degradation for Organic Removal from Iraqi-Oilfield Wastewater Produced: Experimental, Optimization, Kinetic and Economic Insights Study

Globally, large volumes of oily wastewater can be produced due to the industrial developments in petrochemicals, oil and gas, food, and pharmaceutical sectors which can be affected directly on the ground water and drinking water resources. Therefore, it is very necessary treating the injected water into oil reservoirs in order to reduce the formation damage. Photo -catalytic technique can be used to reduce the oil droplets in the produced wastewater of Iraqi-oilfield. In this study, a heterogeneous photo-catalysis process was conducted using (ZnO, TiO2 and AL2O3) as catalysts and UV lamps photo as a source of energy to optimize wastewater degradation under different operating conditions of irradiation time (30-120 minute), pH (3-9), catalyst dose (0.25-1 g), UV lamps (2-8 A). The Mini tab with Response Surface Methodology was used here to validate the experimental results. Based on the results obtained in this work it was observed that the organic removal of oil droplets in photo-catalytic degradation were 98.2% and 92.5%, 88.9% for ZnO, TiO2 and AL2O3 respectively under the optimum operating conditions of time (120 minute), pH (9), catalyst dose (1 g), UV lamps (8 A). The kinetic study results for photo-catalytic reaction under using ZnO were followed pseudo-first order with 0.0032 min-1 at (R2=0.94). Finally, it can be concluded that the photo-catalytic degradation process was an efficient in oil droplet removal from water within using ZnO catalyst as compared with others.