Preparation and characterization of natural polymer for treatment oily produced water

Treatment and disposal of large amount of oily produced water is a considerable economic and environment burden for oil and gas industry. The treatment of produced water requires the separation of suspended and dissolved component such as emulsified oil droplets. The goal of this research is to prepare chitosan as a natural polymer from chitin to yield clean oily produced water has enough beneficial uses like drilling, stimulating, or water flooding. The prepared chitosan characterized by the FT-IR spectrometry, and X-ray diffraction. Then, the percentage of oil droplets removal was evaluated by HPLC and SEM (scanning electron microscopy). It was found that the chitosan could successfully remove 81.45% of residual oil at 0.01ppm dosage, under mixing time at 20 min, mixing rate 200 rpm, sedimentation time for 30 min and a pH value ranging from 5.0 to 6.0.