Cleaning up on oil production

Cleaner and more efficient oil production could result from research being carried out in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Wells on land and offshore produce oil which contains water, gas and sediment. These must be removed before the oil can be processed and used. This typically happens close to where the oil reaches the surface. In the North Sea, for example, it takes place on oil rigs.

One method is to add chemicals which cause the water droplets to merge together, become bigger and so easier to remove. But these chemicals then enter the environment and eventually find their way to the oil refinery.

[Professor Bailes, left, with Jon Lee and Anna Parsons (JPEG, 13 KB)]

Professor Philip Bailes, research assistant Anna Parsons and University of Newcastle academic Dr Jon Lee are developing improved ways of using electrical fields to make the droplets combine together and grow in size.

The basic technique, in use since the early 1900s, tended to short-circuit when the oil emulsion contained more than 15-25 per cent of water. The older an oilfield gets, the higher the percentage of water. Some North Sea wells now produce more water than oil. Professor Bailes has developed a technology which can work with a water content of up to 75 per cent. The technique is based on insulating the high-voltage electrodes in an electric separator and using pulsed DC rather than AC currents to energise the electrodes.

Deep-water offshore rigs - which are becoming increasingly common, especially in the Gulf of Mexico - offer only limited space and can only bear a certain weight. Now the team is researching techniques which could speed up the process, resulting in smaller and lighter separation equipment for use on offshore rigs.

Professor Bailes explained: "We have discovered that there is very little fundamentally known about the way that water droplets behave when they are in a hydro-carbon liquid and electric fields are applied. The work we have done so far has produced some interesting results - not least that the droplets can become charged simply by falling through the oil.

"As our work develops, we may find new ways of making the electrical separation of water from oil more efficient."

The research is financed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, oil-exploration company Amerada Hess Ltd, BP-Amoco Exploration, oilfield contractor NATCO London Inc., Shell Internationale and Texaco Britain Ltd.

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University - Public Relations - Annual Reports - 2000 Contents - Research

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