Abstract
Heavy oils generally exhibit high viscosity, which is detrimental to their production, transport, and refining. The Oil & Gas industry has thoroughly investigated the use of chemical agents to improve the mobility of this type of low-quality crude oils at the surface as well as reservoir conditions for many years. In this sense the main objective of this work is to investigate the viscosity reduction of heavy oil resulting from the presence of silica nanoparticles by asphaltene adsorption process. Silica nanoparticles was produced successfully in this work from sand of Mount Sannam in Basra city (south of Iraq) by chemical and physical methods (SiO 2ch and SiO 2ph respectively). The XRD results indicated a high purity SiO 2ch NPs was produced with purity of 96.8%, while, the purity of SiO 2ph NPs was about 87.2%. The main particle size analyzer (PSA) were measured to be 35 nm and 22 nm for SiO 2ch and SiO 2ph respectively. On the other hand, the BET total surface area of SiO 2ch and SiO 2ph NPs were 520 m 2 /g and 705 m 2 /g respectively. Also, the SEM results showed a uniform distribution of nanoparticles for both prepared silica nanoparticles. The FTIR results indicated a high intensity bonds were formed due to present of functional groups of Si-O-Si, O-Si-O and Si-O. Two Iraqi crude oil samples was selected to be as base fluid with APIs (17.4 and 29.1). Also, diesel fuel with API= 40.91 was tested. For each hydrocarbon a nanofluid was prepared by adding silica nanoparticles to parent fluid. Four concentration of silica nanoparticles were added to the parent fluid (250, 500, 1000 and 1250 mg/L). And also, used a bath ultrasonic method for dispersing NPs inside the parent oils. Keywords: Petroleum Pipelines; natural nanoparticles; viscosity reduction; silica preparation; silica characterization; asphaltene adsorption; crude oil DOI : 10.7176/JNSR/9-4-08
Highlights
The world’s reserves of crude oil amount to 30% in conventional and 70% in non-conventional reservoirs, respectively
The results of this research provide a phenomenological explanation for the viscosity reduction of crude oil by the addition of solid nanoparticles, towards industrial applications to optimize the conditions of mobility and transport and provide a path for new technologies that produce saving economic, energy and good technical performance
5- The results showed that the silica nanoparticles have great effect on the reduction of crude oil viscosity reach to about 46.66 %
Summary
The world’s reserves of crude oil amount to 30% in conventional and 70% in non-conventional reservoirs, respectively. The main challenging characteristics of these crude oils, namely their high specific gravity and high viscosity, complicate their production, transport and refining. These types of crude oils are characterized by containing large concentrations of heavy metals and heteroatoms, and heavy compounds such as asphaltenes, as well as low H/C ratio, which directly influence the observed crude oil viscosity, typically higher than 100 cP at reservoir conditions. The viscosity reduction techniques are environmentally and economically characterized by the high cost This type of techniques included the dilution techniques, thermal techniques, emulsification of oil in water (O/W) emulsions, deasphalting oil by using CO2, nalkanes of low and high molecular weight and in-situ upgrading such as the different modes of air injection, for example, in-situ combustion (ISC) [1,2]. The main strategies of drag reduction methods including the use of some additives (i.e. polymers and surfactant) and use of annular flow technique
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