(83c) Application of Molecular Characterization to Bituminous Crude Oil to Study Asphaltene Precipitation

Md Rashedul Islam, Yifan Hao, Meng Wang, Toni Kirkes, and Chau-Chyun Chen

Department of Chemical Engineering, Texas Tech University

Abstract

Bituminous crude oils are vulnerable to asphaltene precipitation when blended with paraffinic samples. Precipitation behavior depends on the nature and content of the paraffins in the blend. A thermodynamic modeling of asphaltene precipitation from crude oil is important as part of the larger effort to understand the compatibility of bitumen or heavy crude oils with the paraffinic ones. Recently, asphaltene precipitations are predicted from wide spectrum of solvents by aggregation thermodynamic framework [1] developed from Yen-Mullins model [2]. However, precipitation prediction from crude oils is still very difficult because of lack of reliable techniques to represent petroleum fluids with real molecules. In this work, a molecule based characterization approach [3] is utilized to represents Cold Lake bitumen with real hydrocarbon molecules. Additionally, asphaltene precipitations are predicted form mixing n-alkanes with Cold Lake bitumen.

References

[1] M. Wang, Y. Hao, M. R. Islam, and C.-C. Chen, "Aggregation thermodynamics for asphaltene precipitation," AIChE Journal, vol. 62, pp. 1254-1264, 2016.

[2] O. C. Mullins, "The Modified Yen Modelâ? ," Energy & Fuels, vol. 24, pp. 2179-2207, 2010.

[3] C.-C. Chen and H. Que, "Method of Characterizing Chemical Composition Of Crude Oil For Petroleum Processing," US Patent Application Number: 2013/0185044, July 18,2013.