INVESTIGATION ON ENHANCED MICROWAVE DEMULSIFICATION USING INORGANIC SALTS

While the formation of water-in-crude oil (W/O) emulsion is identified to cause serious problems in petroleum industry such as decreasing the oil recovery efficiency, increasing pumping cost, and generating pipeline corrosion, much of its treatment has been focused mostly on gravity separation by mechanical/chemical technology. As an integral part in the process of oil production and transportation, crude oil demulsification has become a significant research attention. Microwave has also long been employed to crude oil demulsification based on the fact that microwave heating can dissipate heat in aqueous medium and raise the energy of the molecules rapidly. However, the research on salts-assisted microwave demulsification has been limited to salts mostly identified in produce-water. The aim of this work is to carry out a comprehensive research on the effect of microwave demulsification and the influence of a variety of inorganic salts to the microwave process. Also, a comparative study on microwave demulsification between heavy oil and light oil were conducted. The obtained results revealed water separation of 47% between irradiated and non-irradiated emulsion for heavy crude oil compared to 13% for light crude oil. Also the effect of different inorganic salts and its optimum amount to promote demulsification were identified.