Байланысты: Сборник конф Фараби Әлемі 2023 химфак-печать
THE BREAKING OF OIL EMULSION OF THE KONYS FIELD IN THE PRESENCE OF FLY ASH PARTICLES Bayekenov A.A., Faizullayev S.N. Supervisor: Adilbekova A.O. Al-Farabi Kazakh National University b.almas2101@gmail.com One of the primary challenges faced by the oil industry is the formation of highly stable oil
emulsions with saline water during production. These stabilized emulsions cause numerous
problems in oil processing and transportation including increased viscosity due to the existence of
tiny water droplets within the crude oil, blockages during transit, expensive pumping and
transportation costs, and pipeline corrosion and catalyst poisoning throughout the refining process.
Therefore, elaborating the efficient method for breaking stable oil emulsions is being main concern
among oilfield researchers.
The process of breaking emulsion into two phases is called demulsification. Nowadays, oil
industry in demand for not only effective but “green” and low-cost demulsifiers. The promising
alternative for conventional chemical demulsifiers and other techniques could be implementation of
coal fly ash. Coal fly ash (CFA) is waste product of powerplants which has the high content of
silica, iron and alumina oxides.
The coal fly ash taken from local powerplant Almaty-2 was applied to water-in-oil emulsions
of various concentrations to separate water from oil at different temperatures. W/O emulsions were
prepared by mixing crude oil from Konys oilfield with distilled water. Thorough analysis of crude
oil composition and ash sample’s structure was carried out. Fly ash was represented mainly by
silica and aluminum oxides with an average particle diameter of 11.5 µm. The particle size analysis
was determined via the laser scattering particle size distribution analyzer Partica LA-960. The test
results comparing CFA and a commercial demulsifier Tween-20 under the same conditions
revealed that CFA was more effective in separating W/O emulsions than the commercial
demulsifier. The microphotographs of W/O emulsion before and after demulsification by applying
ash clearly revealed the effective separation of water, but the demulsification efficiency was not
satisfactory. To improve separation efficiency Tween 20 was applied to the emulsions in
combination with grinded coal fly ash. This resulted in higher demulsification efficiency (100% for
some emulsions). Finally, possible demulsification mechanism caused by CFA particles was
proposed and justified with FT-IR analysis results.
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