The sorptive behavior of organic compounds on retorted oil shale
Abstract
Oil shale is a valuable natural resource of oil. The United States has only 5% of the known world
reserves of recoverable crude oil and about 73% of the known world reserves of recoverable oil
shale. Before there can be full-scale commercial development of oil shale, the problems associated
with the large amounts of wastes generated by the processing of the shale must be solved. The
wastes have a complex chemical matrix. It is felt that the spent shale can be used as a sorbent to
either treat or pretreat the contaminated process waters or could be codisposed with the process
waters, Quite extensive work has been done in exploring this alternative with respect to inorganic
constituents, but that with organic constituents has been mainly restricted to the measurement of
total organic carbon. This study was done to base the analysis of the suitability of the spent shale
as a sorbent upon individual compounds so that a more fundamental understanding could be obtained
as to how families of compounds behave.
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- Doctoral Dissertations [14871]