Efficient Anaerobic Wastewater Treatment

The Client

Emery Oleochemicals is a joint venture between PTT Chemical International, the Thailand National Oil Company and Sime Darby Plantation, the world's largest producer of palm oil.

The JV company is the world's largest producer of natural based oleochemical products such as high quality fatty acids, glycerin, fatty alcohols, triacetin, methylesters and others from refined palm oil as feedstock.

The partnership between Veolia Water Malaysia and Emery Oleochemicals started from an initial refurbishment of the existing 1,000m³/day wastewater treatment plant.

The Client’s Needs

To meet its ongoing growth potential, Emery has increased its production through expansion of its existing plant, but as a consequence, it also needed to increase its wastewater treatment ability in order to meet the new production requirements and the necessary environmental discharge standards.

The existing wastewater treatment plant was running at near full capacity and was also limited in its ability to meet production variations.

For all these reasons, Emery wanted a professional operator to design a new wastewater treatment plant, refurbish the existing one, propose process monitoring plans and manage the wastewater treatment facilities.
 

Veolia Solution

• Emery Oleochemicals awarded Veolia Water a 10 year Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) contract covering the operations of the existing facilities, together with renovation and extension of the existing wastewater treatment plant.
• The extension project used wastewater treatment technology from Biothane® using an EGSB anaerobic reactor.
• Process description:
• Veolia provided the process design and engineering for the anaerobic plant extension, the Biobed® EGSB equipment and biogas treatment equipment to enable the biogas to be suitable for re-use in one of Emery's major boiler units.
• High rate treatment, small footprint impact and biogas production are the main advantages of this anaerobic technology. With a design flow rate of 67 m3/hr and a capacityof 12,000kg of COD loading per day (double the existing plant), the wastewater treatment plant is now able to meet all of the Department of Environment's discharge standards and generate sufficient biogas for boiler operation. This biogas production results in a significant saving of natural gas consumption for Emery's operation.