Oil Removal Solutions Blog

Whether your power plant is coal-fired, gas-fired, hydroelectric or nuclear, petroleum-based products like fuel, hydraulic fluid and lubricating greases and oils are critical to operational success.

Supporting numerous lubricant connections, bearings, hydraulic seals and moving equipment parts, such as pumps, conveyors, feeders, scrubbers, cranes, turbines and more—it’s inevitable that these petroleum-based products will find their way into the process, cooling, or cleaning water that flows throughout a plant—posing operational challenges. 

Typically, this oily or greasy water flows to one of four places within a power plant:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of our company—Oil Skimmers, Inc. For the last five decades, we’ve provided customers in 119 countries with simple, effective and reliable oil removal solutions.

In over 35,000 applications around the world, our products are used to tackle waste oil challenges. By implementing our skimming systems, oil/water separators and oil removal solutions, our customers are able to improve wastewater treatment processes, reduce maintenance costs and lower operational expenses, while simultaneously lessening their environmental impact.

But don’t take our word for it. Below, we’ve curated a few of our favorite customer quotes.

Removing oil from any industrial process is important. Animal fats, grease and petroleum-based oils all have a significant impact on both overall maintenance and environmental compliance of an operation.

Hence why oil refineries, chemical plants, steel mills and many other types of companies throughout the world use oil/water separators. This flow-through device takes advantage of the fact that oil has a lower density than water, causing it to float on the water’s surface, to separate oil from the wastewater.

But isolating the waste oil is only part of the wastewater treatment equation. An area where oil/water separators commonly fall short is efficient removal of the oil after the separation occurs.

This is where oil skimming comes in.

An integral part of being an engineer is staying up to date on new discoveries, developments, trends and news in your particular field. The ever-evolving nature of the job makes staying ahead of the curve a challenge, but necessary.

Finding a good source of relevant information amongst the plethora of available resources can be difficult and time consuming. That’s why we’ve rounded up 10 noteworthy resources for engineers. In no particular order:

After learning about the benefits of oil skimming and deciding to remove oil from water in your application, you’re faced with a decision: which type of skimmer is best for your particular application?

Companies that install an oil skimming solution reap immediate benefits—lowering their ecological footprint, reducing maintenance requirements and an improving their overall wastewater treatment process, all while increasing profits. But in order to maximize these benefits, choosing an appropriate system is key.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Power Magazine.

Oil skimmers are very effective in removing oil from wastewater before discharge but are also perhaps the most efficient and economical approach.

Despite these advantages, oil skimmers are not found in every power plant. Some plants rely on less-efficient oil removal procedures, failing to recognize that even a single release could cost more money than upgrading a facility to modern oil-skimming equipment.

Recognizing the limitations of belt skimmers and other oil removal methods, 50 years ago we invented the “better belt skimmer”, the Brill® tube type oil skimmer.

Using the right type of oil skimmer can be just as important as deciding to skim oil in the first place. Whether your business is considering a new skimming solution or has traditional belt skimmers in operation already, it’s important to be mindful of common challenges that our customers have faced before they upgraded to Brill® tube type oil skimmers.

We’ve listed and described five of the most common complaints that we have heard from customers about traditional belt skimmers. If any of the following issues sound familiar, Oil Skimmers, Inc.’s oil skimmer with the Free-Floating Collector Tube™ is the better belt skimmer for you.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

With a fleet of 250 tanker trucks—35 of which are used to haul soybean oil—one U.S.-based trucking company is dedicated to thoroughly cleaning its large fleet following transportation jobs. The oil tankers can each haul approximately 48,000 pounds of oil, so when cleaning the tanks, a significant amount of residual oil often mixes with the wash water.

As is common practice in many municipalities, local regulations require the trucking company to remove all residual oil from the wastewater before allowing the wastewater to be discharged into the city sewer system. When the trucking company reassessed their process for doing so, they found glaring inefficiencies.

You’re probably aware of why skimming oil is important, but do you know how skimmers actually collect oil? Are you certain the type of skimmer you’re using is the best choice?

There are a handful of different oil skimming solutions, but we will focus on the most efficient and reliable system—tube-type oil skimmers.

How the Oil Skimmer Works

The Brill^® tube skimmer type uses a special closed-loop Free-Floating Collector Tube™ that is designed to attract oil but not water. The collector tube is slowly drawn across the surface of the wastewater, and this movement creates a current to pull oil in. The oil-covered tube then passes through special ceramic scrapers that clean the tube of the waste oil, collecting it in a container. From there, the cleaned tube then returns to the tank to continue collecting oil.

For decades, our oil removal solutions have played an important role in businesses that deal with fat, oil or grease (FOG) in process water, coolant or wastewater at some point in their operations. Oil removal technology can improve your wastewater treatment processes, reduce your ecological footprint and improve the bottom line.

To learn more about how oil skimmers and systems work in a variety of applications and industries (or if you’d just like to catch up on what you’ve missed), we’ve curated the 10 most viewed Oil Skimmers, Inc. blog posts of 2018. This list includes the top viewed posts over the past year.