Winter Park, FL -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/20/2014 -- Handex Industrial Services (HIS), a division of Handex Consulting & Remediation (HCR), LLC and a leading provider of Sludge Dewatering Services for oil refineries located in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, announced today that it was awarded a chemical sludge dewatering contract for approximately $750,000.

The project is for an environmental engineering and consulting firm conducting hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale Formation in east central Ohio. HIS employees will work 24 hours per day to reduce the existing sludge inventory for the first month of the contract. HIS anticipates dewatering on site for a total of six months to two years.

Chemical sludge produced by treatment of flowback wastewater, a by-product of hydraulic fracturing, requires dewatering with HCR's mobile low pressure plate and frame filter presses before being trucked off site for disposal. Dewatering minimizes the weight of waste trucked off site by 70%-80% and maximizes the volume of water for recycling, which in turn provides the producer with significant savings.

HIS processes more than 40 million gallons of sludge annually, and is fully equipped and prepared to support ancillary mobile wastewater treatment facilities for hydraulic fracturing operations in the Northeast. HIS is excited to be actively involved in this growing industry that is at the scientific forefront of oil and gas production.