Dissolution of barite using coordination chemistry: Optimization and characterization

Abstract

This work included two different types of dissolving process (inorganic and organic) which used for the complete dissolving barium sulfate (barite). The inorganic solvents were involved digestion on hotplate with recipe of mixture acids with hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid, aqua regia, and fusion with sodium carbonate. The second set of experiments was involved organic ligands such as EDTA, DTPA and a mixture of them. Different parameters were tested in these experiments which were time, molarity of the ligand, amount of barium sulfate and pH. Barite was incompletely dissolved when inorganic solvents were used in experiment. Whilst, the organic ligands show that EDTA is the best ligand for the complete dissolving of barite comparing with DTPA and mixture of EDTA and DTPA. The optimal condition of the highest dissolution of barite by using EDTA were time for 30 h, molarity of the ligand is 2 M, amount of barium sulfate = 0.5 g, and pH = 13 at room temperature. At this condition, the dissolution of barite was 88.56%. It is worth noting that the experiments were carried out at room temperature because the study simulates the dissolution of barite scale in petroleum pipes.