Abstract
Today, opportunity crude oils and their blends have attracted the attention of oil companies looking to increase their cross refinery margin. However, when crude oils are blended in the wrong proportions or even the wrong order, they can precipitate asphaltenes (called incompatibility). Once precipitated, it is difficult to re-dissolve asphaltenes quickly. Meanwhile, asphaltenes precipitation is a common problem for oil production companies and refiners and can cause foul preheats exchangers, and catastrophic coking of distillation furnace tubes. If this happens, refineries can lose more than the advantage of purchasing the crude.
This paper focused on possibility of transporting crude oil blends (Sarir, Messla, Nafoura and Amna) through 34 inch Sarir pipeline about 512 km to Hariqha Seaport, prior to blending the crude oils have to be compatible in order to avoid phase out and precipitation of asphaltenes. This work discusses the compatibility of Libyan crude oils as a model system. Various simple techniques were investigated to the determination of insolubility number (IN) and solubility blending number (SBN) and the prediction of a compatibility scale for two blends. Effect of colloidal instability based on asphaltenes precipitation and SARA composition on fouling was also discussed.
