Document Type : Regular Article

Author

• Ali Anwar Ali

Petroleum Technology, University of Technology, Baghdad

Abstract

Asphaltene precipitation from reservoir fluids during oil production is a serious problem because it can result in plugging of the formation, wellbores and production facilities. An efficient modelling technique based on the representation of the precipitated asphaltene from live oil of Khasib Formation / Halfaya Oil Field as a pure dense phase is presented. The success of the approach is based on the division of the heaviest component in the oil into a nonprecipitating and a precipitating component. This case study described the procedure for modeling the precipitation of asphaltene from a live reservoir oil due to pressure depletion. The thermodynamic model used to describe the precipitation of asphaltene. The precipitation of asphaltene is modelled using a multiphase flash calculation in which the fluid phases are described with an equation of state (Peng-Robinson equation of state) and the fugacities of components in the solid phase are predicted using the solid model. The used model showed that there was asphaltene precipitation problem of the selected fluid at specified conditions and approaching these conditions should be avoided during production to provide treatment costs.

Keywords

• Asphaltene precipitation
• Asphaltene Deposition
• Asphaltene Precipitation Modeling