Crude oil emulsion breaking: An investigation about gravitational and rheological stability under demulsifiers action

Abstract

Emulsions are common in the oil industry, being present in the extraction and production stages. Its formation occurs with the contact of brine and crude oil under intense flow. The presence of emulsified water (dispersed droplet size, φ ≤ 50 μm) in crude oil can negatively impact its exploration, transportation, and refining, making transportation more expensive, requiring more energy for heating, and causing equipment corrosion on all processes. In addition, crude oil has salts and sediments that encrust and corrode equipment of the primary oil treatment unit and distillation towers, also causing catalyst poisoning in the cracking step. Therefore, such components need to be removed for subsequent refining processes. To prevent these problems, the dehydration/desalting of crude oils is a strategy adopted to reach adequate values of water, salts, and sediments required in the refineries for the next steps after primary treatment. However, the emulsion breaking is influenced by several factors that affect the stability of crude oil (W/O emulsion), such as viscosity, contents of water, salts, sediments, and natural surfactants, among others. Given this perspective, this work investigated the stability of two different types of crude oils with demulsifier under the action of gravity (bottle test) and shear stress (rheology). The comparisons of gravitational and rheological techniques concluded that the shear stress sweep analyses are useful to evaluate the demulsifier performance in the emulsion breaking, being a reliable and fast methodology. Such studies allowed the identification of adequate parameters: temperature (80 °C) and, demulsifier type and quantity (500 ppm) for efficient crude oil phase separation, without using washing water. The physicochemical and rheological characterizations clarified the crude oil's colloidal stability behavior to understand the impurities' influence on the oils' properties (crude and desalted).