Former Steel and Coking Factory Reconversion for 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, China

Former large industrial sites are often subject to closure or relocation, especially when situated in urban areas. It was the case of a major former steel and coking factory, covering an area of 8.63 km², located in the west of Beijing (China), for which the industrial activity was stopped in 2006.  These types of sites present a big issue in terms of ground pollution, due to the industrial activity, and therefore space reconversion. In this case, the former industrial site is to be transformed into a brand new park for the next Winter Olympics of 2022.

Due to this reconversion, a lot of buildings will be destroyed, but others will mainly be renovated to create housing, training facilities, Olympic sites or administrative buildings. In order to guarantee enough space, about 100.000 m² have to be adressed in some way.  This topic will focus on the remediation aspect for hydrocarbons (C10-C40, PAH, BTEX), and especially in situ thermal remediation, which was used to remediate some areas of the site.

The first phase of the project was to build a pilot unit to treat an area of 100 m² at a depth of up to 9m below ground, so a total of 900 m³ of soil. The pilot was executed in 60 days of heating time and delivered successful results in terms of remaining concentrations of hydrocarbons in the soil. Based on this, the full scale treatment started in march 2018 and ended in december 2018. The whole area to cover was about 32.900 m², with a total volume of 64.850 m³ of soil. The very challenging aspect of this project was to complete the remediation phase in less than a year, which required to operate of very large number of of heating unit. The challenge was met but there are still many areas to remediate before the start of the next Winter Olympics.

The ISTD  (in situ thermal remediation technology) demonstrated to be a fast and reliable approach for the remediation of more than 1 ha of contaminated soil in a reasonnable short time frame, using more than 700 heating elements working at the same time, in hardly accessible areas, as most of the former steel and coking factory buildings and facilities were still standing.