Study of the treatment of oil-based muds from PEMEX's storage centres using thermal plasma in a deoxygenated atmosphere

In this project, evaluation of plasma thermal process applied for degradation of hazardous waste was performed when the process was operated without oxigen, for degradation of oily sludge. Such wastes are produced from petroleum refineries and represent a problem due to the fact that they hazardous and great amount of them are generated in Mexico and the world; moreover there are not current with high efficiency to treat them. In this study the degradation experiments were made using two different sludge samples, one them was free of sediments, the bigger portion was water and hydrocarbons and the other sample was characterized by to had a high amount of sediments. These samples were obtained from a storing center of PEMEX. Process was operated utilizing different characteristics of the by-product. The biggest decrease in volume obtained with the sample of high amount of sediments was 85%, and such by-product resulted inert. For the sludge free of sediment the highest decrease of volume obtained was 95.5% and this by-product contained high amount of carbon in the form of dust, almost 50% of carbon mixes with clay material. The degradation efficiency of organic material was higher than to 99.99%. The residual gases formed during the degradation had low molecular weight