Wastewater Recycle For India's First Landlocked Refinery HMEL - Bhatinda Using HERO™ Process

HMEL (HPCL-Mittal Energy Ltd.) is a joint venture between Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) and Mittal Energy Investment Pte Ltd, Singapore. This 9 MMTPA refinery, built through public private partnership, is located at village Phullokhari in Bathinda district of Punjab. The refinery will produce petroleum products complying with Euro IV emission norms. The refinery is a zero bottom plant, with a very high Nelson Complexity Index.

The refinery is located in interior Punjab away from the sea or any flowing water source. This land locked area also has limited availability of fresh water and no provision to discharge wastewater, therefore maximizing recovery of fresh water from the waste water was imperative.

This being a state of the art refinery with multiple sources of effluents generated, the challenge was to treat these multiple sources of effluent in four probable combinations. Alternatively, the plant was expected to also work on raw water in the event of non availability of effluent streams. This meant varying feed water characteristics. The design analysis also consisted of contaminants like COD, TOC and high levels of silica which normally limit the recovery in conventional membrane based recovery systems. Therefore, it was necessary to use an advanced membrane based technology that would give assured high recovery in the membrane system and would reduce the size of the downstream ZLD system.