Comparative Study on Compositions of Oil-Water Transition Layer before and after ClO2-Treatment Process

In order to meet the need of separating oil from water in the settling tank of the oilfield, ClO2 treatment for oil-water transition layer in settling tank is introduced. The field test displayed that the technique was achieved by a good performance. For understanding the oxidation and mechanism, compositions of oil-water transition layer were comparatively studied for before/after ClO2-treatment in this paper.The experimental results show that the compositions before and after ClO2-treatment, including physical structure and chemical composition, were varied in the great extension. The physical structure, consisting of water, oil and solid phase, was reduced to less than 5% of water and 0.5% of solid particle and increased to 95% of oil in layer compared with before-treatment, easily leading to clearly separating water from oil. The chemical composition of iron sulfide and acid insoluble substance in solid phase was decreased to more than 90% while the carbonate was reduced more than 70% . After the treatment, the viscosity reduction of the water phase in the layer was reached to 50% after oxidation demulsification with ClO2. The chemistry was discussed based on the principles and experiments. Due to ClO2 destroying (oxidizing) the rigid interface membrane structure which is supported by natural surfactant, polymer and solid particles with interface-active materials, the action accelerates the separating of water and oil and sedimentation of insoluble residue of acid in the layer. By demonstrating the experimental data and discussion, we can effectively control the oxidation performance of chlorine dioxide, which is very meaningful for oilfield on the aspect of stable production of petroleum.