abstract
The energy industry has registered a considerable growth of petroleum production from reservoirs located in deep and ultra-deepwater, mainly in Brazil. The Brazilian Pre-Salt fields, specifically, have shown high carbon dioxide content which favors the precipitation of organic particles such as asphaltenes. This scenario has turned flow assurance into a major technical and economic challenge for the exploitation of those fields. In this work a variable-volume cell equipped with a near-infrared probe was used to study the onset of asphaltene precipitation induced by carbon dioxide, evaluating the effects of pressure, temperature, asphaltene concentration, and system composition. Furthermore, the Cubic Plus Association (CPA) was applied to model the asphaltene precipitation. The results show that temperature and the oil model system composition were the parameters that most influenced the asphaltene stability, and that the CPA adequately described the asphaltene precipitation.
keywords
PRESSURE PHASE-BEHAVIOR; EQUATION-OF-STATE; NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY; CARBON-DIOXIDE; HYDROCARBON SOLVENTS; SUPERCRITICAL CO2; CRUDE OILS; AGGREGATION; TOLUENE; DEPOSITION
subject category
Chemistry; Engineering
authors
Cruz, AA; Amaral, M; Santos, D; Palma, A; Franceschi, E; Borges, GR; Coutinho, JAP; Palacio, J; Dariva, C
our authors
André Palma
Post-Doc Fellowship
acknowledgements
The authors thank Petrogal Brasil S.A. as well as Galp Energia for the financial support. This work was partly developed within the scope of the project CICECO-Aveiro Institute of Materials, POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007679 (FCT Ref. UID/CTM/50011/2013), financed by national funds through the FCT/MEC and when appropriate co-financed by FEDER under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement. The authors acknowledge KBC Advanced Technologies Limited (A Yokogawa Company) for the use of Multiflash.