produces approximately 1.5 tonnes of greenhouse gasses. In the past, industry has invested heavily in solving this problem – Stan estimates that more than a billion dollars has been spent on research and development globally – but their default solution has been to manage the liability of dieselsoaked waste by mixing it with sawdust, or other stabilization materials and landfilling it. “Incidentally, sawdust and other stabilization materials are added to create a material that’s bulky and stackable and doesn’t allow liquids to freely leach away,” Stan explains. “This is known as ‘stabilizing the waste’ so that it behaves less like wet cement and instead, more like peat moss.” One of the early discoveries that Recover made, however, is that the solution resided in dedicated facilities that would have increased capacity when compared to on-site equipment. And for that to become economical, they realized, “the waste stream needed to be centralized.” Recover’s technology is a solvent extraction process that is commonly used in many other applications including soybeans, canola oil, algae, palm oil extraction, and in analytical labs to measure constituents in sample matrices like contaminated soils. Recover has applied this process for washing drilling waste. “The process is really simple to describe,” Stan says. “We wash the drilling waste with a solvent that dissolves the diesel fuel. We then recover our solvent using a distillation column. A distillation column is how a refinery produces diesel from FEBRUARY 2024 Leachate from Class II Industrial Landfills
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