Harsco Corporation has announced that its second strategic technology alliance this year aimed at providing environmental solutions to significant industrial waste streams, with the signing of an exclusive agreement with Equinox Environmental Limited, a UK based green technology company that has developed proprietary processes for the cost effective resource recovery and re use of certain industrial by products.
This latest agreement will address the processing and remediation of various industrial solid waste streams that involve surface hydrocarbon contamination, such as oily mill scale from steelmaking operations; used foundry sand from foundry operations; and oil storage tank residues referred to as tank bottoms at oil refineries, which are primarily a mixture of oil and sand. The technology is designed to liberate the value in the oil and produce an inert, oil free residue as a by product.
At steel mills, the technology will be used to clean oily mill scale and allow the cleaned, oil free scale to be recycled, thereby returning valuable iron units into production. At the same time, the recovered oil can be either sold or used as fuel within the steelmaking process. At refineries, Equinox's technology has been used to separate and recover residual oil content from tank bottoms. As with the oily steel mill scale, the recovered oil can either be recycled or sold on the commercial market. Moreover, the resultant oil free sand can be recycled without further processing, thus eliminating the need for carbon releasing burn off, as is the case today with some current technologies.
The companies plan to jointly market the technology as a turn key, onsite resource recovery and environmental compliance service, drawing extensively from Harsco's worldwide operating footprint in combination with Equinox's broad contacts throughout the petroleum industry. The technology is expected to further add to Harsco's established plant services to steelmakers, refineries and other large industrial operations through its Harsco Metals and Harsco Infrastructure business groups. The companies are already in discussions with a range of industrial customers and several pilot demonstration projects are expected to be underway in 2012.
Mr Salvatore D Fazzolari chairman, president & CEO of Harsco said that "This is a promising technology with the potential for expanding Harsco's knowledge based, onsite industrial services into new business areas. We look forward to this further addition to our growing environmental solutions portfolio."
