Application of Pineapple Skin Waste as a Source of Biosolvent for Use as Wax Inhibitor

Abstract

Wax paraffin deposition is a problem faced in the pipeline for petroleum industries that they blockage the partial or full inside the pipe, which will decrease the production rate. One of the treatments is to use the preventive methods called wax inhibitors which are expected to inhibit the crystallization of paraffin wax, and bio-solvent is included. Hydrolysis and fermentation technique are used to produced bio-solvent. Hydrolysis aims to break lignin and hemicellulose, damage the crystal structure, and increase the porosity of the material. At the same time, the occurrence of pentose changes and some glucose into ethanol is present in the fermentation process. Then, purified by the distillation process to obtain bio solvent products that are applied with waxy crude oil can reduce the pour point value of crude oil. From the hydrolysis process with five variations of acid percentage, the amount of reducing sugars increase. By increasing temperature from 50 ° C to 100 ° C, the reducing sugars continues to increase until it reaches the optimal point of 18.2 ° Brix. The amount of inoculant also affects the level of bio-solvent where the optimum results using inoculants are 0.015 g/mL, which produces 6% levels of bioethanol. The high ethanol content of 2% had a density value of 0.979 g/mL. The best °API at 5% is 13.901, and the average value is about 13.0945, where the best viscosity values for ethanol content of 6% are 0.814. Bioethanol testing using waxy crude oil is carried out with the bioethanol content of 6%. The addition of the ethanol contents only decreased the pour point 2-3℃. At sample, #LGK19 experienced a 3°C drop in pour point from 45°C to 42°C. Therefore, it can be concluded that bioethanol used as a solvent can potentially inhibit paraffin deposition.