Abstract

Palm kernel shell and Palm kernel husk have been used to remove Barium, Zinc and Mercury from drill cuttings. Batch adsorption studies were carried out as function of pH, contact time and Carbon dosage. Barium, Zinc and Mercury were found to be pH dependent with optimum pH of 9 for all activated Carbon materials. Barium and Zinc APKS was 150mins, while Barium and Zinc APKH was 120mins. For Mercury both APKS and APKH attained maximum adsorption at 60mins. For maximum adsorption, the adsorbent loading was 5g for Barium and Mercury APKS, 3g for Zinc and 4g for Barium, Zinc and mercury APKH. Although Barium and Zinc did not exceed the regulatory limit, the equilibrium experimental data were found to best fit the Freundlich Isotherm model for APKH with R2 = 99.84% for Ba, 85.66% for Zinc and 89.92% for Mercury. The intensity of adsorption for Barium was 0.9420, 0.0710 for Zinc and 0.2935 for Mercury. Although their was ion adsorption of heavy metal ions at low concentration, the low intensity values below unity indicates that adsorption using Palm kernel shell and husk is not very favorable for the removal of Barium, Zinc and Mercury from drill cutting.