FORMULATION AND PRODUCTION OF CRUDE OIL DEMULSIFIERS FROM LOCALLY SOURCED MATERIALS

¹Odisu ,Teddy* and   ²Salami, Deborah .O

¹Department of Chemical Engineering, Igbinedion University, Okada, Edo State

²Department of Chemical Engineering, Igbinedion University, Okada, Edo State

E-mail: teddyodi2002@yahoo.com

ABSTRACT

The presence of crude oil emulsions in the production and processing systems is of great concern to the oil industry worldwide. This is because of their huge cost to the oil industry and hence the global economy in terms of the risk of corrosion of export and subsea pipelines and refining equipment, possible catalyst poisoning, increased crude oil pumping costs and other associated problems. However, chemical demulsifiers have been favourably applied in the treatment of these emulsions and most of them are produced overseas and imported. Consequently, in this work,demulsifiers were formulated using locally sourced materials, their effectiveness was ascertained by contacting with five emulsion samples from different Shell pumplines and comparing their water removal abilities with commercially available once. For sample A, CD-Z (local demulsifier) gave at 250 minute, 11 ml compared to 10.5 ml for CD-A (commercial) For sample B CD-Y (local) gave 6ml against 8.5 for CD-C (commercial), for sample C, CD-X gave 20ml against 15.5 for CD-C (commercial) and for sample D, CD-X (local) gave 19ml compared to 16ml for CD-C (commercial). The result shows that these demulsifiers from local materials if properly worked on will not only give good water recovery but also help reduce our dependence on imported ones.

Keywords: Crude oil, water, Emulsion, demulsifiers, local, commercial.