Study of Activation Energy for Viscous Flow of Mixtures as a Measure of Dilution Efficiency for Heavy Oil-Diluent Systems

Adango Miadonye, Mumuni Amadu, Iysha Kumari and Isha Jain

International Journal of Chemistry, 2024, vol. 16, issue 2, 1

Abstract: As the demand for crude oil continues to increase in response to the continued global needs for it, the development of unconventional crude oil reserves is the only way to sustain global supply. However, the excessively higher viscosity of heavy crude oil makes it less attractive for conventional pipeline transportation. Therefore, reducing the viscosity of heavy crude oil to meet crude oil transporting pipeline regulations is a necessity. This paper has assessed the dilution efficiency of well-known diluents in the petroleum industry, using different dilution ratios based on a thermodynamic approach involving activation energy and heat of vaporization determination. Based on selected dilution ratios, kinematic viscosities of binary and ternary systems of toluene and natural gas condensate as diluents, and Saudi Heavy crude oil as the base oil were measured, using anticipated field based temperatures reported in the literature, which facilitated the experimental approach. The study shows that although the ternary systems have the lowest activation energy for viscous flow and heat of vaporization in accordance with the thermal activation theory of viscous flow, natural gas condensate binary systems have the lowest cost of transportation per barrel of total fluid in the transporting pipeline. The study further shows that the binary systems for toluene and Saudi Heavy crude oil have higher activation energy for viscous flowed compared to the toluene systems.

Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijc/article/download/0/0/50166/54290 (application/pdf)
https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijc/article/view/0/50166 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ibn:ijcjnl:v:16:y:2024:i:2:p:1

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Chemistry from Canadian Center of Science and Education Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Canadian Center of Science and Education ().