Review Article
Sellami MH*, Naam R and Tem
Abstract
Crude oil often contains fine saline water droplets, salt crystals, suspended solids and traces of metals. To meet business requirements, the salinity of the latter is limited to 40 mg/L and (BS&W) Basic Sediment and Water must to be lower than 1%. For this reason and to prevent corrosion, plugging, and fouling of equipment, electrical desalting plants are often installed in crude oil production units. This paper presents the results of a laboratory work conducted regarding the impact of important key parameters of oil desalting, namely: the rate of wash water, oil temperature, and injected chemical demulsifier amount in aim to achieve their optimum value and thus to reach the lowest oil salinity and (BS&W) without applying electrical field. Experiments conducted in South Crud Treatment Unit laboratory (UTBS/Hassi-Messaoud/Algeria), showed that the salts removal efficiency (SRE) increases with increasing the wash water rate, demulsifier amount and operating temperature. For 5% of wash water rate and 0.5% of demulsifier at 52°C, the (SRE) was 96.94%. Applying these parameters values to electrical desalting vessel with electrical field supply, would increase the (SRE) to a remarkable extent. The mean value recorded for (BS&W) during experiments was only 0.5%.