Removal and recycling of the organic pollutants from the oily hazardous wastes by cyclone deoiling technology

•The oil content of oily hazardous wastes dropped from 7.7% to 0.27%, meeting the standard of 0.30%, and the oil removal efficiency reached 98.1%.•The optimal conditions of cyclone deoiling technology are carrier air flow temperature of 200°C, inlet flow rate of 85 m3/h, and feed rate of 6 kg/h.•Recovered oil has the potential to replace 0# white oil and 5# industrial white oil and can be recycled as a resource.•Compared with the traditional heating method, the cyclone deoiling technology saves energy consumption by 70%. Oily hazardous wastes generated from the shale gas exploitation has long been a major environmental threat, yet traditional treatment techniques are suffered by high energy consumption and secondary pollution. To address this challenge, we developed an optimized Cyclone Deoiling Technology that directly separated the oily compounds from drilling wastes and recycled into diesel fuel products with high purity. Instead of destructing the hazardous wastes, the oily components were extracted from porous solid substrates by coupling revolution-rotation movement. By doing so, as low as 0.34 kWh/kg energy consumption was achieved, which is 70% lower than that of heating approaches, and the recovery rate was over 98%. Using our prototype facility as testbed, the oil content in solid wastes was dramatically reduced from 7.7% to 0.27% after treatment, qualifying the environmental standard of 0.3%. We believe the technology is a promising technique facilitating the sustainable development of the oil and gas industry. [Display omitted]