Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Industrial Technology Validation (ITV) program evaluates the performance of new, emerging, and underutilized technologies in industrial applications to help inform decisions about their commercialization and deployment. This ITV demonstration evaluated an electrocoagulation (EC) treatment system for oily wastewater generated from cold rolling operations at the Cleveland-Cliffs steel-making facility in Cleveland, Ohio. The EC system was tested alongside the facility’s existing chemical flocculation (CF) system to compare water quality, oil recovery, chemical use, and electricity consumption. The evaluation found that the EC system was effective in treating oily wastewater and improved tramp oil collection efficiency by approximately 25% while reducing chemical use by 60–100%. EC-treated water had slightly higher turbidity and lower conductivity than water treated by the existing CF system. The EC process required substantially more electricity and resulted in higher-than-expected iron content in the recovered oil due to the system’s iron anode plates. Overall, the demonstration identified potential benefits from reduced chemical use and improved oil recovery while also identifying energy-use and oil-quality considerations for implementation.