Development of the early warning model for oil produced water pollution and compliance with the guidelines using dimensional analysis

This paper reports on the development of a model intended to provide an early warning indication of pollution caused by oil produced water and also serve as a predictive tool for compliance/noncompliance to the set guidelines related to the discharge of wastewater into municipals' channels. The development of this model made use of the results obtained for the measurements of the various physico-chemical parameters of the oil-produced water samples collected from the treatment plant at an oil refiner depot. In addition, the development of the model made use of the rate of evaporations patterns observed for the oil-produced water samples stored in a Class A evaporation Pan. The modelling approach was based on experimental data collected at the oil depot, in South Africa for six months and a multiplicative model was developed to relate OPWE as a function of influencing parameters. The developed model indicated a reasonably well accuracy (RMSE = 0.49 mm) for the OPWE estimation. The evaporation and correlation study supported the hypothesis. Furthermore, the model developed by this work has the potential to be used for fingerprinting since OPWE from different processes may have similar chemical compositions but in different levels and ratios.