Oil/water emulsions are one of the major threats to environment nowadays, occurs at many stages in the production and treatment of crude oil. The oil recovery process adopted will depend on how the oil is present in the water stream. Oil can be found as free oil, as an unstable oil/water emulsion and also as a highly stable oil/water emulsion. The current study was dedicated to the application of microbubble air flotation process for the removal of such oily emulsions for its characters of cost-effective, simple structure, high efficiency and no secondary pollution. The influence of several key parameters on the process removal efficiency was examined, namely, initial oil concentration, pH value of the emulsion, and the effect of adding sodium chloride. The effect of bubble size on the performance of the separation process and its impact on removal efficiency was also investigated. The results demonstrated that removal efficiency obtained by using microbubbles flotation was higher by factor of 1.72 in comparison with that achieved with fine bubbles. The removal efficiency of oil droplets was increased with the increasing of flotation time and initial oil concentration. The removal efficiency reached up 60.68% under alkaline conditions (pH≈9), and it increased to around 75% by decreasing the emulsion acidity to around (pH≈3). The addition of sodium chloride has a significant influence to the efficiency of the flotation process. The efficiency could be reached to about 84% by adding 1 gL−1of NaCl to the emulsion. While increasing the NaCl concentration to 9 gL−1resulted in reduction in removal efficiency to around 80%.
Formation of emulsions during oil production is a costly problem, and decreased water content in emulsions leads to increases productivity and reduces the potential for pipeline corrosion and equipment used. The chemical demulsification process of crude oil emulsions is one of the methods used for reducing water content. The demulsifier presence causes the film layer between water droplets and the crude oil emulsion that to become unstable, leading to the accelerated of water coalescence. This research was performed to study the performance of a chemical demulsifier Chimec2439 (commercial) a blend of non-ionic oil-soluble surfactants. The crude oils used in these experiments were Basrah and Kirkuk Iraqi crude oil. These
... Show MoreThe estimation of quantity of liquid that is collected from gas/oil separation system is a very complex task because it requires the application of the flash calculations which needs to solve the cubic equation of state and to use some numerical techniques. These difficulties can be overcome by a computer model which requires a lot of experimental data, long time, and experience.
This paper adopts a new technique to simplify this problem. It suggests new correlations for optimum separator pressure for separation station of heavy oils. The correlations have been achieved for two- and three- stage separation systems.
The co
Smart water flooding (low salinity water flooding) was mainly invested in a sandstone reservoir. The main reasons for using low salinity water flooding are; to improve oil recovery and to give a support for the reservoir pressure.
In this study, two core plugs of sandstone were used with different permeability from south of Iraq to explain the effect of water injection with different ions concentration on the oil recovery. Water types that have been used are formation water, seawater, modified low salinity water, and deionized water.
The effects of water salinity, the flow rate of water injected, and the permeability of core plugs have been studied in order to summarize the best conditions of low salinity
... Show MoreThis research was aimed to study the efficiency of microfiltration membranes for the treatment of oily wastewater and the factors affecting the performance of the microfiltration membranes experimental work were includes operating the microfiltration process using polypropylene membrane (1 micron) and ceramic membrane (0.5 micron) constructed as candle; two methods of operation were examined: dead end and cross flow. The oil emulsion was prepared using two types of oils: vegetable oil and motor oil (classic oil 20W-50). The operating parameters studied are: feed oil concentration 50 – 800 mg/l, feed flow rate 10 – 40 l/h, and temperature 30 – 50 oC, for dead end and cross flow microfiltration.
It was found that water flux decrea
The water injection of the most important technologies to increase oil production from petroleum reservoirs. In this research, we developed a model for oil tank using the software RUBIS for reservoir simulation. This model was used to make comparison in the production of oil and the reservoir pressure for two case studies where the water was not injected in the first case study but adding new vertical wells while, later, it was injected in the second case study. It represents the results of this work that if the water is not injected, the reservoir model that has been upgraded can produce only 2.9% of the original oil in the tank. This case study also represents a drop in reservoir pressure, which was not enough to support oil production
... Show MoreThe implementation of nanotechnology in all industries is one of most significant research fields. Nanoparticles have shown a promising application in subsurface fields. On the other hand, various surfactants have been used in the oil industry to reduce oil/water interfacial tension and also widely used to stabilize the nano-suspensions. The primary objective of this study was to investigate the improvements of surfactants ability in term of interfacial tension (γ) reduction utilizing addition of silicon dioxide nanoparticles at different temperatures and salinity. The pendant drop technique has been used to measure γ and electrical conductivity has been used to measure the critical micelle concentration (CMC). The synergistic effects of
... Show MoreIn this paper, split-plate airlift electrochemical reactor as an apparatus with new configuration for wastewater treatment was provided. Two aluminum plates were fixed inside the reactor and present two functions; first it works as split plates for internal loop generation of the airlift system (the zone between the two plates acts as riser while the other two zones act as downcomer) and second it works as two electrodes for electrocoagulation process. Simulated wastewater contaminated with zinc ions was used to test the performance of this apparatus for zinc removal by studying the effect of different experimental variables such as initial concentration of zinc (50-800 ppm), electrical current density (2.67-21.4 mA/cm2), init
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