Drilling oil and gas wells generates hazardous waste. A massive amount of drilling waste such as drill cuttings, comes out of the bore hole and the impact ton the environment is potentially quite damaging.

Furthermore, with the downturn in the industry there is an obvious focus in oil and gas industries on reducing and avoiding costs.

The Thermomechanical Cuttings Cleaner (TCC), developed by Thermtech, is the most applied thermal desorption solution that has been utilized to treat the drill cuttings both offshore and onshore since 2000. The TCC technology is based on converting kinetic energy into thermal energy by creating friction in a Thermtech developed process mill. Major differentiators compared to any other thermal technology is the extreme short retention time of the waste in the TCC unit which results in recovered oil comparable to the original base oil with a high processing capacity in a small footprint.

Recovery and re-use

• Expensive drilling fluids can be re-used in new oil based muds (OBM) or as fuel for diesel engines, while cleaned solids have various industrial uses, such as a substitute for chalk in asphalt.
• Valuable components of the waste are not dumped or re-injected but recovered and re-used.

Efficient treatment of drilling waste

• Drilling waste consists of small pieces of rock, the cuttings, which break away due to the action of the bit teeth. The cuttings are screened out of the liquid mud system at the shale shakers.
• The drill cuttings is the largest waste stream generated while drilling for hydrocarbons.
• The amount of drill cuttings generated and the value of the drilling fluids continue to grow as a consequence of the more sophisticated drilling technologies and deeper boreholes.
• The impact on the environment is potentially huge if the drill cuttings are not treated properly.
• The environmental regulations are becoming increasingly stringent in many oil producing territories.
• The TCC® is able to efficiently separate the oil from the solids, enabling the oil to be commercialized, and ensuring the solids are non-hazardous to the environment.
• No complicated logistics and less handling.

Other applications

The TCC technology can be applied for treating any waste containing volatile substances such as municipal waste, tank bottom sludges and liquid waste streams from agricultural, food and mineral processes. Furthermore, Thermtech has also a test center equipped with a laboratory scale TCC that is used for feasibility studies of new applications and specific needs. The Thermtech Test Unit is flexible and is able to operate at temperatures ranging from 50 to 500 degrees Celsius, depending on the sensitivity of the components to be recovered. Thermtech also has several feeding mechanisms into the Process Mill depending on the viscosity of the material, in addition to methods to adjust the boiling-point of the liquids. For more information, click here.

A video about the technology process can be viewed here.