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Water-in-oil emulsion treatment of crude oil effluent: techniques, additives and simulation

Savvidou Despoina

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Summary

Emulsions can be found in almost every part of the petroleum production and recovery process: in reservoirs, produced at the wellheads, in themrefining processesmand in transportation pipelines. The presence and nature of emulsions define the technical way for their treatment. The mechanisms for emulsion destabilization are flocculation, creaming, sedimentation, coalescence and Ostwald ripening. The separation of an emulsion can be achieved with any combination of methods such as: use of chemical demulsifiers (chemical treatment), increase of temperature (thermal treatment), apply of electrostatic fields (electrical treatment) or use vessels with high residence time (mechanical treatment).This work intends to provide an analytical description of the variety of the separation mechanisms, including innovative techniques such as the oscillatory mixing, the microwave radiation, the sonication, the ultrasonic treatment and the electrostatic method.An important part of this work was to research and collect data about recent commercial chemical demulsifiers. The components of thedemulsifiers such as droppers, treaters, desalters and wetting agents and their purpose of use are described in details. Methods such as the SAD method, the HLB value are presented and especially the RSN value is used widely in the literature. The procedure of acquiring representative samples for specific tests like the bottle test is also described in order to provide information about the effectiveness of the treatment chemicals on the separation of the emulsions. There are demulsifiers for strict environmental restrictions, or treating light oils, heavy oils, working well at low temperatures or in low or high water cuts. The activity, the solubility and the RSN value is given for the majority of the presented demulsifiers. However, most companies can produce tailor-made demulsifiers based on customer’s specifications and performance requirements.The last part of this work refers briefly to the emulsion simulations and the difficulty to have consistency between the simulations results and the experimental data. A large number of articles is published worldwide for the development of the simulation models. The simulation task is still a subject of state-of-the-art research.

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