Hercules, Inc.-Aqualon Company (Aqualon) manufactures Natrosol^® product at their Parlin, New Jersey site.  The plant uses tertiary-butyl alcohol (TBA) during the manufacturing of the product.  TBA has been detected in the groundwater moving underneath the plant and a nearby municipal well field.  TBA is fully miscible in water, and does not readily biodegrade; as such, it is relatively recalcitrant once it enters the environment.  Aqualon, with its consultants, extensively studied various methods to reduce the TBA contamination, including in-situ methods, and concluded that containing the plume using a series of recovery wells and treating the extracted groundwater using an ex-situ biological reactor was the most cost-effective method of reducing the TBA to meet the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s (NJDEP’s) groundwater quality criteria (less than 100 parts per billion).  This paper reports on this first-of-its-kind biological TBA removal system, discussing the design, commissioning, and operating results.
            Aqualon worked with Shaw Environmental, Inc. (Shaw) personnel during initial laboratory development and field-pilot testing of a biological fluidized bed reactor (FBR) to degrade the TBA at the Parlin site.  Shaw provided a turnkey system to treat up to 1,000 gallons per minute of extracted groundwater, including the design, procurement, installation and startup of all equipment.  In January 2007, the TBA removal system was commissioned and the two biological FBRs were inoculated with a TBA-degrading bacterial culture (ENV735™).   The TBA-degrading microbes have maintained over a 98% reduction in TBA concentration across the treatment system.  In summary, the biodegradation of TBA in a fluidized bed reactor, handling large quantities of water with variable influent concentration, is a unique approach that has proven extremely effective at reducing the TBA in the groundwater to well below groundwater quality criteria.