Abstract
AbstractAsphaltene Precipitation is a major issue in both upstream and downstream sectors of the Petroleum Industry. This problem could occur at different locations of the hydrocarbon production system i.e., in the reservoir, wellbore, flowlines network, separation and refining facilities, and during transportation process. Asphaltene precipitation begins due to certain factors which include variation in crude oil composition, changes in pressure and temperature, and electrokinetic effects. Asphaltene deposition may offer severe technical and economic challenges to operating Exploration and Production companies with respect to losses in hydrocarbon production, facilities damages, and costly preventive and treatment solutions. Therefore, asphaltene stability monitoring in crude oils is necessary for the prevention of aggravation of problem related to the asphaltene deposition. This study will discuss the performance of eleven different stability parameters or models already developed by researchers for the monitoring of asphaltene stability in crude oils. These stability parameters include Colloidal Instability Index, Stability Index, Colloidal Stability Index, Chamkalani’s stability classifier, Jamaluddin’s method, Modified Jamaluddin’s method, Stankiewicz plot, QQA plots and SCP plots. The advantage of implementing these stability models is that they utilize less input data as compared to other conventional modeling techniques. Moreover, these stability parameters also provide quick crude oils stability outcomes than expensive experimental methods like Heithaus parameter, Toluene equivalence, spot test, and oil compatibility model. This research study will also evaluate the accuracies of stability parameters by their implementation on different stability known crude oil samples present in the published literature. The drawbacks and limitations associated with these applied stability parameters will also be presented and discussed in detail. This research found that CSI performed best as compared to other SARA based stability predicting models. However, considering the limitation of CSI and other predictors, a new predictor, namely ANJIS (Abdus, Nimra, Javed, Imran & Shaine) Asphaltene stability predicting model is proposed. ANJIS when used on oil sample of different conditions show reasonable accuracy. The study helps Petroleum companies, both upstream and downstream sector, to determine the best possible SARA based parameter and its associated risk used for the screening of asphaltene stability in crude oils.
Highlights
Crude oil contributes a considerable portion to the energy demand of the world (Alimohammadi et al 2019)
According to the widely accepted definition, Asphaltene is the fraction of crude oil which exhibits insolubility in n-alkanes n-pentane and n-heptane, whereas it becomes highly miscible in aromatic compounds such as toluene, benzene, xylene. (Goual 2012)
The molecular weight of asphaltene is not fixed, and researchers have reported a wide range of asphaltene molecular weight because asphaltene molecules undergo in the selfassociation phenomenon which depends upon its polarity, causing it to grow in size and increase the molecular weight (Zheng et al 2020)
Summary
Crude oil contributes a considerable portion to the energy demand of the world (Alimohammadi et al 2019). Unstable and stable zones are marked on each cross plot through separating curve These plots can identify crude oil stability status in terms of asphaltene precipitation risk. For evaluating the accuracy of applied predicting models, seventeen (17) crude oil samples SARA data having known asphaltene stability status information under field conditions are taken from three different published research papers (Rogel et al 2001; Leon et al 2002; Wattana et al 2005). Approximately equal number of stable (S) (08) and unstable (U) (09) crude oil samples are used so that asphaltene predicting models overall accuracy cannot be affected by the imbalanced class distribution of applied SARA dataset.
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