Utilization of Plant Extract For Treatment Of Emulsions In Crude Oil Production

Abstract

Emulsion formation causes enormous challenge in the oil and gas industry. Two types of emulsions are common in the oilfield; water in oil and oil in water emulsions. Water in oil emulsion is the most common and thus considered in this work. Emulsions are formed when two immiscible fluids (oil and water) from the reservoir are agitated in the presence of an emulsifying agent during production. Treatment of water in oil emulsion is a costly process and thus, in this work, environmentally friendly demulsifiers are formulated from orange peels and soya bean husks. The orange peels and soya bean husks were first dried under sunlight and ground into fine particles. Thereafter, Soxhlet Extraction technique was used to extract the demulsifiers; orange peel oil (OPO) and soya bean husk oil (SBHO) respectively. The OPO and SBHO were tested on crude oil sample obtained from Niger Delta and results compared with a commercial demulsifierphasetreat (PT). Using bottle test method, the OPO, SBHO and PT were tested on the crude oil sample at different concentrations of 0, 200, 400, 600, 800 and 1000ppm’s at 500, 1000 and 1500rpm, respectively. The concentrations and revolutions per minute where SBHO, OPO and PT achieved their best separations of crude oil are thus, at 200ppm and 1500rpm it was observed that OPO had 60% crude oil separation. SBHO had 45% crude oil separation at 400-600ppm’s using 500rpm. And PT had its best crude oil separation of 87.5% at 500rpm using a concentration of 1000ppm, respectively. It shows that OPO and SBHO performed below the PT, however, with improvements on OPO, it shows a prospect of becoming a usable commercial demulsifier