The Persian Gulf Bidbland Gas Refining Company in Khuzestan Province, located 17 km from Behbahan-Ramhormoz road, will build the Behbahan Wastewater Treatment Plant with a capacity of 28,000 cubic meters per day, the managing director of the company said.
“Currently, 28,000 cubic meters of sewage from Behbahan City enters Maroun River without treatment. The construction of the wastewater treatment plant seeks to prevent this,” the Oil Ministry’s news agency Shana also quoted Mahmoud Aminnejad as saying.
A tripartite memorandum of understanding for the construction of the treatment plant was signed on Sunday between Bidbland Gas Refining Company, Khuzestan Provincial Environment Department and Khuzestan Water and Wastewater Company.
Aminnejad noted that currently, the refinery uses about 8,000 cubic meters per day of water from Behbahan Water Treatment Plant that has a total daily capacity of 50,000 cubic meters and the remaining treated water is supplied to Behbahan County.
“Associated petroleum gases, which were burned in the country for years, are now used as feed in this refinery and turned to value added products,” he said.
The Bidboland refinery has a daily capacity of processing 56 million cubic meters of APG from the East and West Karoun oilfields that include several large oilfields straddling the Iran-Iraq border, namely Azadegan, Yaran, Yadavaran and Darkhoein.
The huge complex generates $1.5 billion a year, including $700 million from exports. It has an annual production capacity of 10.4 million tons of methane that will be injected into the gas grid, 1.5 million tons of ethane, 1 million tons of propane, 600,000 tons of gas condensates and 500,000 tons of butane to be fed into petrochemical plants in Mahshahr and Gachsaran.
An estimated 900,000 tons of acid gas produced each year in the plant will be injected into oil wells in the Aghajari fields in Khuzestan to boost crude output and produce 600,000 tons of gas condensates.
PDH Unit
Another project in the refinery, which became operational recently, is a propane dehydrogenation (PDH) unit with an investment of $1 billion to complete the propane value chain and create more added value.
The new project seeks to produce propylene from the propane supplied by the refining complex with a capacity of 450,000 tons per year.
PDH is a promising catalytic technology utilized for the conversion of propane into propylene, which is involved in many petrochemical applications.
In addition to propylene, the PDH plant produces other byproducts (mainly hydrogen).
As the demand for propylene in the country is much more than the output, plans are underway to increase its production to 4 million tons a year from the current 1 million tons per year in three years.
Propylene is the second most important product in the petrochemical industry after ethylene. It is the raw material for plastic polypropylene, which component is mainly used in the automotive, textile and packaging industries.
The primary source of propylene is from cracking naphtha and other liquids such as gas oil and condensates to produce ethylene. However, propane can also be used to produce propylene.
Propylene is a colorless gas with a naturally pungent smell. Although similar to propane, it has a double bond that gives it a combustion advantage, i.e., it burns hotter but is non-toxic.
The gas can be transformed into value added products like polypropylene and create jobs in the downstream petrochemical sector.
