(11e) Experience from the World's Largest Seawater Filtration Plant for Oil Reservoir Injection

Oil reservoir injection water should be noncorrosive, non-scaling, disinfected and free of particulate matter to minimize reservoir damage. Plant #1 ? a Saudi Aramco facility ? with a present design capacity of 9.5 million barrels per day, is the world's largest seawater filtration treatment plant for oil reservoir injection. The design capacity is to be further increased to 14 million barrels per day in 2008. The present filtration system consists of 76 horizontal deep bed pressure filters using granular filter media. These down flow pressure filters are the largest of this type that have ever been built. Each filter is capable of handling 125,000 barrels of water per day. The filters are designed so that suspended solids in treated water should not exceed 0.2 mg/l, with no more that 10% of the solids exceeding the 2 micron size.

The objective of this paper is to give an overall overview of this unique seawater filtration facility and to share some of the challenges encountered, as well as the improvements done to this system, especially on filters' design and the sea water intake channel.