Oil Removal Solutions Blog

Water plays an important role in most industrial processes and is often mixed with oil as a result. Removing oil from water early and often by way of skimming is key in maintaining a healthy process. In fact, if ignored, oily water could be detrimental to your productivity, reputation, and ultimately, your bottom-line.

In this post, we’ll present six potential consequences if oil is not separated and removed from water early in the water treatment process.

Removing oil in the process or wastewater stream is critical to maximizing efficiencies within your operation. So, how can you start removing oil?

Oil skimmers offer the greatest flexibility when integrating this function into your existing workflow.

Choosing the right partner for your application will lead to the most effective installation and a larger ROI. As the first in their field, the Oil Skimmers Inc. team has the experience and continues to set the standard for providing what every customer should expect. Read on for six steps to choose the right partner.

Inadequate oil removal equipment could be costing your manufacturing company money.

In this post, we discuss how tube type oil skimmers—those that use a closed-loop tube on the water’s surface to attract floating oil or grease—can save you money compared to alternatives.

1. Efficiently Removes Oil

Because they can’t get clogged with floating debris (leaves, sticks, etc.), tube skimmers consistently outperform fixed oil skimmers (belt, drum and disc) at efficiently and reliably removing petroleum-based oil, fats, greases, and oily wastes on the water’s surface. The tube simply snakes around the water, moving the debris aside, as it removes the oil.

2. Lowers Filtration, Water Treatment and Disposal Costs

Effective oil removal translates into less costs related to filtration, chemicals and other forms of secondary water treatment.

And it doesn’t stop there. Since tube skimmers capture and concentrate waste oil with little-to-no free water, disposal costs are also less. Higher waste oil concentrations lessens the volume and cost of vacuum collection, and off-site recycling or disposal.

In just about every industrial process on earth, whether it’s making steel or cosmetics, food processing, mining, railroads, or construction, water plays an important role in a company’s operations.

Whether you’re part of a small team or working for a large organization, there are always ways to fine-tune your internal manufacturing processes—sometimes with very little investment.

One of these investments is oil skimming. With one new solution, your team could see improved asset performance, less downtime, and ultimately, advanced efficiency.

In this post, we look at five ways environmental and process engineers can increase efficiency from start to finish—primarily with oil skimming.

Doing nothing about floating waste oil?

At Oil Skimmers, Inc., we think our products are the best in the world at removing floating waste oil in industrial maintenance applications. We have a lot of reasons for saying that and sometime we’ll talk more about those reasons, but what never ceases to amaze me is the number of times we compete against the alternative of a customer “doing nothing” with their floating waste oil.

Doing nothing, that is, not skimming floating oil, can be an option for certain customers. So we are often in the position of educating the customer to the benefits of recovering waste oil versus letting it accumulate.

So, Why Should You Skim Oil?

There are several reasons why floating waste oil in an industrial environment should be skimmed.

Wastewater treatment is a major challenge for organizations across a variety of industries. To better understand why this is the case, consider the following scenario.

A privately held potato chip plant hoped to increase its snack production by 20% to roughly 72 million pounds a year. However, the plant faced a major obstacle to achieving this goal: While cleaning the fryers throughout production, large amounts of oil mix with wash water.

Not to mention the plant discharges a whopping 180,000 gallons of water each day.

After installing an oil skimmer to remedy the issue, the plant was able to successfully remove about 2,000 gallons of oil per week from the wastewater system.

Read on to see how this change benefited the potato chip plant in the long run, and how oil skimming could work for you too.

Excess oil in manufacturing processes can have detrimental effects to overall operations, as it:

• Shortens the life of machining coolant
• Can result in costly equipment malfunctions and maintenance
• Can affect the quality of finished parts

Fortunately, there is a solution.

Oil skimming can save manufacturers thousands of dollars in maintenance issues and ensure that finished products are the best quality possible.

Oil skimmers remove tramp oil from coolant or parts-washing solutions before it can cause problems downstream. The process is easy to execute, affordable and can provide multiple benefits to those in the manufacturing industry. Below, we’ve highlighted three key ways oil skimming directly contributes to a smoother manufacturing process.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Skimming oil early refers to removing oil as close as possible to the point of origin—ideally, where oil first enters the wastewater stream from the process that generates it.

The earlier you skim oil, or grease and fats, the more benefits you’ll see. Early oil removal can result in cost savings you might not have considered possible before now. By removing oil early, you can lower your water bills, lower your wastewater treatment rates, and see increased efficiency. You may even reap a handy payback if enough oil is recovered for reuse, or to be sold.

Read on for five use cases in which skimming early paid off.