atea Environmental Group has working closely with our client in refinery industry to develop a spent caustic recovery technology.

As we all know, caustic is commonly used to wash sulfur from crude oil refining industries.

These Spent caustics basically consist of sulfidic spent caustics, cresylic spent caustic and naphthenic spent caustic.
Spent sulfidic caustics typically have a pH greater than 12, sulfide concentrations exceeding 2–3 wt% which is high sulfide concentrations up to 2.5 M. It is also contain a large amount of residual alkalinity, thiols, phenols, and amines.
In addition, other industry like chemical manufacturing, Natural Gas Sweetening and LPG Sweetening also produce great volumes of Spent caustic.

The spent caustic from these industries is the most difficult of all industrial wastes to dispose. atea has been conducting research for many years on spent caustic recovery for refining industry.
Our recent finding found that with combination of oxidation and membrane technology, we could effectively treat and recover spent caustic.