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Industrial Wastewater Canada sizes and supplies oil water separators for plants in Sarnia, Ontario. Local demand is driven by petrochemicals, refining, chemicals, bio-industrial, discharging under Sarnia's sewer-use rules toward St. Clair River. Quote requests with flow rate and effluent type get a sized proposal.

Every vehicle wash bay, machine shop, fuel depot and refinery in Canada faces the same line item in its sewer-use bylaw: oil and grease, typically capped somewhere between 15 and 100 mg/L depending on the municipality. An oil water separator is the standard way to meet that cap. It exploits the density difference between oil and water: flow slows inside the vessel, droplets rise and coalesce into a surface layer that gets skimmed, and cleaned water leaves from below.
The choice that matters is between the two main designs. A gravity API separator is a long rectangular basin sized to Stokes' law, built to let droplets of roughly 150 microns and larger rise out. It is robust, tolerant of solids and easy to maintain, which is why refineries still standardize on it. A coalescing-plate separator adds inclined plate packs or oleophilic media that intercept far smaller droplets, down to about 20 to 60 microns, so it reaches better effluent quality in a fraction of the footprint. Our coalescing configurations hold effluent under 10 ppm oil and grease in free-oil service, and many sites pair an API basin with a coalescing polishing stage.
We quote both, in above-grade and below-grade tanks, with API 421 compliant configurations where the specification calls for it. Options include oil-stop valves that close automatically when the oil layer reaches capacity, high-level alarms, and sludge baffles for streams that carry grit. What a separator will not do is remove chemically emulsified or dissolved oil; if your stream carries surfactants from a wash process, we will tell you plainly that you need chemical treatment or flotation ahead of the separator, because selling you a tank that cannot meet your limit helps neither of us.
Sizing depends on flow rate, droplet size distribution and oil type, which is why the search term oil water separator, at 480 searches a month in Canada, so often ends in a mis-sized purchase from a catalogue. Send us your flow, a recent lab analysis or a description of the process, and your discharge destination. We return a sized configuration, budget price and delivery timeline, reviewed by a process engineer before it reaches you, for any site in Canada. Installation support and commissioning are quoted per project, and replacement plate packs and media remain available for the life of the vessel. Below-grade installations ship with traffic-rated covers where the separator sits in a drive lane, and we keep skimmer parts and alarm components on the shelf so a maintenance call does not become a compliance gap.
Sarnia's Chemical Valley is the densest petrochemical cluster in Canada: refineries, polymer plants, chemical producers and a growing bio-industrial park line the St. Clair River south of this city of 72,000. Most major sites hold their own MECP Environmental Compliance Approvals as direct dischargers to the St. Chemical Valley — Canada's densest petrochemical cluster; MECP ECAs for direct discharge to the St. Clair. That is the regulatory backdrop for oil Water Separators in Sarnia: equipment gets sized against the local limits on the route to St. Clair River, not against a national average.
Location
Sarnia, Ontario
Population 72K
Receiving Water
St. Clair River
Pricing
Sized & quoted per project
In Sarnia's Chemical Valley, wastewater means direct-discharge ECAs on a binational drinking-water river, where spent caustic and benzene-contact streams are managed under refinery process-safety culture. In Sarnia, the plants asking about oil Water Separators are mostly in petrochemicals, refining, chemicals and bio-industrial, and each of those sectors puts a different load on a treatment train. Chemical Valley — Canada's densest petrochemical cluster; MECP ECAs for direct discharge to the St. Clair. Direct discharge toward St. Clair River instead requires an Environmental Compliance Approval from Ontario's Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks. Sarnia's municipal plant has limited spare capacity, so a single overloaded industrial connection shows up quickly in its intake numbers. Projects in Sarnia tend to be one-of-a-kind rather than repeat configurations, which is exactly the case where sizing from measured effluent data matters most. Contractors here are expected to arrive safety-trained, CSSE-cleared and fluent in refinery permitting culture before the first meeting.
Everything you need to know about our services.
Yes. Industrial Wastewater Canada sizes and supplies oil Water Separators for plants across Sarnia and the surrounding region. Most local demand comes from petrochemicals, refining, chemicals, bio-industrial. Send a quote request with your flow rate and effluent type and a sized proposal follows.
Chemical Valley — Canada's densest petrochemical cluster; MECP ECAs for direct discharge to the St. Clair. Clair, a drinking-water source for communities downstream on both sides of the border and home to Aamjiwnaang First Nation, whose presence keeps environmental performance under continuous public examination. Direct discharge on a border drinking-water river An ECA on the St. Plants discharging to the municipal sewer answer to that regime; anything released directly toward St. Clair River needs an Environmental Compliance Approval from Ontario's Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks. We size equipment against whichever limit governs your outfall.
From your numbers, not from the city's. We start with measured flow and effluent characterization, then check the result against Sarnia's local limits. A processor in a city of 72K with petrochemicals as the dominant sector rarely has the same loading profile as its neighbours, so treatability data drives the selection.
There is no list price; every system is sized and quoted per project. The economics are local, though. Clair is among the most demanding permits in Ontario, with limits, monitoring and spill-notification obligations reflecting the river's binational status. Valley wastewater work spans sour water, spent caustic, benzene-contact streams, cooling-water chemistry and stormwater from tank farms, all governed by process-safety practice where any tie-in requires management of change. The emerging bio-industrial cluster adds fermentation effluents, high-BOD but benign, needing conventional biological treatment. Payback in Sarnia is usually calculated against those surcharge and compliance costs, and the quote spells that comparison out.
Flow, contaminants, discharge limit. An engineer replies with a sized treatment train and a quote — no obligation.