Status of Modeling and Visual Observation of Mineral Scaling in High Temperature Aqueous Solutions

During petroleum and natural gas production, deposits of mineral scales throughout the production facilities cause not only production losses, but also equipment damage, and enhanced corrosion leading to serious safety concerns. While scaling at temperatures below 150 °C is relatively well studied, scaling at high-temperature, high-pressure (HTHP) conditions, such as those typically encountered in offshore ultradeep reservoirs, is a significant challenge and is poorly understood. A thermodynamic model needed for predicting Gibbs energies of aqueous species and, therefore, simulating scaling in HTHP conditions representative of ultradeep offshore oil and natural gas reservoirs is being developed. This presentation will provide the status of the model development along with experimental visualization of the scale formation observed in our laboratory.