Aquatech to Supply Fertilizer Plant with Wastewater Recycling

The Chinacoal Tuke Fertilizer Project, located in the city of Ordos in the Inner Mongolia region, will eventually produce 2 million tons of synthetic ammonia and 3.5 million tons of urea.  The project is an area where water scarcity is critical, pollution control regulations are strictly enforced and zero liquid discharge facilities are required, Aquatech said.
 

The EPC contractor for the project, East China Engineering Science & Technology (ECEC), selected Aquatech to design and build the wastewater recycling and zero liquid discharge system at the site. Aquatech’s water treatment system will comprise a high efficiency reverse osmosis HERO unit and a Zero Liquid Discharge unit.
 

Reject water from the effluent treatment plant will be fed to the HERO plant, which passes through a clarifier, dual media filter, weak acid cation, and a reverse osmosis unit. Once the reject water passes through the reverse osmosis unit, it’s sent to a brine concentrator and then to an evaporation pond, the company said. Aquatech will provide the concentrated brine treatment plant in the utilities unit.
 

The Chinacoal Tuke Fertilizer Project will use broken coal slag pressurized gasification technology to make raw gas, which is converted to hydrogen. After cooling, purification and removal of impurities such as sulfide, carbon dioxide and methane will be compressed with nitrogen in a synthesis gas compressor. The final product, urea, will come from the ammonia synthesis working section.
 

The wastewater treatment plant handles all the industrial waste from the fertilizer project. The wastes are primarily recycled wastewater from phenol ammonia, blow down from gasification circulating water, wash waste from low temperature methyl alcohol and other integrated wastewater, including ground rinse water and sanitary wastewater. The main pollutants in the wastewater come from phenol ammonia waste in the gasification process.
 

ECEC says it selected Aquatech’s system because of its better life cycle costs and record of higher recovery from wastewater systems. The contractor also was influenced by Aquatech’s installation in the YTH project in China, which has a similar project.