FHRPineBend.com - Emissions: Water Emissions

Learn about Flint Hills Resources' pollution prevention efforts and how you too can make a difference.

Source Data information for water emissions.

This file is in Microsoft Excel Comma Separated Values format.

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FHR manages and treats water from many different refinery operations, including:

Crude oil desalting and product washing
Boiler feed water generation
Cooling tower and boiler blowdown
Sanitary sewage (from offices and shops)
Excess storm water not recycled within the refinery processes

FHR has a state-of-the-art wastewater plant that treats all refinery wastewater. FHR's wastewater plant includes oil removal (including emulsion and colloidal oil removal and dissolved air floatation), biological treatment, activated carbon and long-term polishing.

As part of its emission reduction effort, FHR reduced water emissions. It did this by improving wastewater management practices and stabilizing the load sent to the wastewater treatment plant. An example of improved management practices is the use of a refinery waste permit, which requires approval of the wastewater operators before non-routine discharges are routed to the wastewater plant.

Most of the wastes removed from the water are recycled back into the refining process, and air emissions are controlled with fixed and floating roofs (with double edge seals) or a thermal oxidizer, which destroys the odor and most of the air emissions from the wastewater plant.

Data Quality
Sum of NPDES and TRI pollutants to water.

Data Source
Data obtained from FHR's Monthly Discharge Monitoring Reports as part of the NPDES program and the Annual Toxic Release Inventory reports.

The refinery�s wastewater treatment plant continues to achieve excellent performance. The refinery has not had an effluent exceedance in over six years and is one of the few non-municipal wastewater treatment plants to receive the MPCA�s Wastewater Operator Award. Flint Hills has taken a planned approach to wastewater treatment by improving wastewater management practices and stabilizing the load sent to the wastewater treatment plant.

Flint Hills is currently working on a project that will enable the refinery to further treat and reuse some of its wastewater. In order to produce the cleaner diesel fuel required by the federal government in 2006, Flint Hills is building several new processing units. Operating these processing units will require additional water. Instead of drilling a new well and increasing its groundwater consumption, the company will instead build a new treatment process that will enable the refinery to provide the additional water needed by reusing its wastewater.<

The Mississippi River is a valuable resource, not only as a drinking water supply, but for its aquatic life as well. MCEA encourages FHR to continue its efforts to further reduce pollutant loading to the river. In particular, we are concerned with discharges of ammonia, heavy metals, phosphorous, and chloride salt as these pollutants have an adverse effect on aquatic life.

Flint Hills Resources uses a significant amount (7 million gallons per day) of groundwater for their operationsFollowing a recent evaluation by FHR that looked at increasing the amount of groundwater extracted, the company decided instead to use treated wastewater effluent from its wastewater treatment plant instead of increasing its groundwater use. We are pleased with FHR's plans and we encourage the company to further its reuse efforts."