Tuesday, November 6, 2007
335r

Prediction of Asphaltene Precipitation from Crude Oil Using Tuned Eos by Empirical Model

Bader H. Al-Busairi, Sami H. Ali, and Mohamed A. Fahim. Chemical Engineering, Kuwait University, P.O.Box 5969, Safat, 13060, Kuwait

The prediction of asphaltene precipitation during oil production is of great interest and importance. Obtaining the precipitation data experimentally is very tedious. Moreover, trials to improve Equation of states by association model and/or SAFT model require at the end the use of experimental data. Therefore, in this work, a model was developed to predict asphaltene precipitation based on the crude oil physical and chemical properties. The amount of precipitated asphaltene as a function of pressure was determined experimentally for different crude oils (25 crude oils) and where compared with the predicted values based on SRK Equation of State (EOS). The prediction based on EOS was modified to include corrected pressure that relates the crude oil properties to the onset pressure for asphaltene precipitation for each studied crude oil. This new model has two major advantages. First, it provides a significant improvement to asphaltene precipitation prediction than using EOS alone. Second, it requires knowing only the crude oil physical and chemical properties. Finally, this model was tested with different crude oils that were not included in the correlation database and it shows a good agreement with the experimental data.