Electrochemical-based processes for produced water and oily wastewater treatment: A review

The greatest volume of by-products produced in oil and gas recovery operations is referred to as produced water and increasing environmental concerns and strict legislations on discharging it into the environment cause to more attention for focusing on degradation methods for treatment of produced water especially electrochemical technologies. This article provides an overview of electrochemical technologies for treating oily wastewater and produced water, including: electro-coagulation, electro-Fenton, electrochemical oxidation and electrochemical membrane reactor as a single stage and combination of these technologies as multi-stage treatment process. Many researchers have carried out experiments to examine the impact of various factors such as material (i.e, electrode material) and operational conditions (i.e., potential, current density, pH, electrode distance, and other factors) for organic elimination to obtain the high efficiency. Results of each method are reviewed and discussed according to these studies, comprehensively. Furthermore, several challenges need to be overcome and perspectives for future study are proposed for each method.

Comparison between an electrochemical reactor with and without membrane for the nor oxidation using novel ceramic electrodes

The electrochemical oxidation of the antibiotic Norfloxacin (NOR) in chloride media on different anodic materials was studied at two different electrochemical reactors. The results were compared with those obtained in sulphate media. The anodes under study were a commercial boron-doped diamond (BBD) and two different ceramic electrodes based on tin oxide doped with antimony oxide in the presence (CuO) and absence (BCE) of copper oxide as sintering aid. The reactors employed were a one-compartment reactor (OCR) and a two-compartment one with a membrane separating both electrodes (EMR). The use of the membrane clearly enhanced both NOR degradation and TOC mineralization for all the anodic materials studied since some parallel reactions were avoided. Additionally, two different pathways for NOR oxidation were observed as a function of the reactor employed. The EMR also favoured the ionic by-products generation and the electrolyte dechlorination. NO₃^- increased with the oxidation power of the anode employed and it was also enhanced by the EMR use. Chloride media favours ceramic electrodes performance independently of the reactor employed as they did not generate an excess of oxidants as BDD did. The BCE electrode is an interesting alternative to BDD since although its oxidative power was lower, it presented similar current efficiency with lower energy consumption.

Precise control of iron activating persulfate by current generation in an electrochemical membrane reactor

Activated persulfate (PS) oxidation is promising for contaminant removal but a lack of controllable activation can lead to a loss of reagents and thus low contamination degradation. Herein, we have proposed and investigated an innovative method to control PS activation by introducing ion exchange membrane into electrochemically activated PS. This electrochemical membrane reactor (EMR) could precisely control PS activation by adjusting electrical current for slow release of Fe²⁺, and also avoid direct contact between PS and a sacrificial anode electrode (iron electrode)/an alkaline cathode solution. It was found that the PS decomposition rate constant was linearly increased by increasing the applied current (R² = 0.988). The rate of the released Fe²⁺ also exhibited a linear relationship with the applied current (R² = 0.995). Compared to one-time dosage of Fe²⁺, the EMR-based slow-release process had higher contamination degradation and better PS utilization (molar ratio of the decomposed PS to the migrated Fe, 1.04 ± 0.01:1), thereby minimizing the waste of both reaction reagents and generated radicals. The EMR was also employed to degrade a representative dye contaminant in a controllable manner and achieved 95.7 ± 0.7% removal percentage with PS dosage of 3.0 g L^-1 within 20 min. This study is among the earliest to explore effective approaches for precisely controlling PS activation and subsequent oxidation of contaminants.