ANALYSIS OF VISCOSITY OF LIGHT OIL AND ITSEMULSION FROM AN OILFIELD IN THAILAND

Abstract

Emulsion from oil and produced water is normally found during oil production. It forms at many stages in the petroleum recovery and process industry such as drilling, oil production, and transportation. The majority type of emulsion is water-in-oil emulsion and the water volume fraction of emulsion can be up to 60%. This emulsion results in the operating problems for oil production like higher pressure drop in the pipeline and higher viscosity for oil production. Consequently, the objective of this work is to measure the viscosity and evaluates the effects of parameters on viscosity of oil and its emulsion from an oilfield in Thailand. The parameters that influences in emulsion viscosity are temperature, shear rate and water cut. The temperature, shear rate and percentage of water cut for this study are ranging from 30 to 90 °C, from 1 to 74 s-1 and from 10-60%, respectively. The results are shown that temperature plays the significant role in viscosity reduction with increasing temperature. Furthermore, the viscosity of emulsions slightly decreases as the shear rate increases and its viscosity extremely decrease at high percentage of water cut. Moreover, the correlation for predicting viscosity with shear rate, temperature and 10%-50% of water cut is developed for future work.