Jiangsu Haipu Informs You About Some Methods for Treating High-Salinity Wastewater

High-salinity wastewater originates from the sewage discharged during the extraction and processing of oil and natural gas. It contains at least 1% salt. There are many types of substances in wastewater, and the methods for generating high-salinity wastewater are numerous, with the amount being discharged gradually increasing. Removing organic pollutants from high-salinity wastewater is crucial because these substances pose significant environmental hazards. Using biological methods can be challenging as high concentrations can inhibit microbial activity, requiring large investments and high costs, often failing to achieve the desired results. However, this method is currently a key research focus in our country.

To address the issue of treating high-salinity wastewater, the distillation desalination method can be employed. This is an ancient and most commonly used desalination method. Distillation involves boiling the saline water, then evaporating it, and subsequently condensing the steam into fresh water, making it the most convenient method to reduce the discharge of high-salinity wastewater. This method is simple in structure, easy to operate, and produces high-quality fresh water.

The MSF (Multi-Stage Flash) method is one of the mature technologies for desalinating high-salinity wastewater. Taking seawater as an example, it is heated to a certain temperature and then introduced into a flash chamber. A portion of the heated seawater will vaporize, thereby lowering the temperature of the high-salinity wastewater, and the resulting steam condenses into the required fresh water. Industrial saline wastewater usually contains refractory organic compounds that inhibit microbial activity, making it difficult to meet discharge standards using purely biological methods. Electrochemical methods are costly and have a low COD removal rate. Therefore, the combination of biological, physical, and chemical methods has great development prospects in the treatment of high-salinity wastewater and represents the future direction of treatment.