Sharif Digital Repository

Flow assurance is a major challenge in offshore and deepwater operations. Conventional approaches for preventing gas-hydrate formation involve using thermodynamic inhibitors (e.g., methanol, glycol) or kinetic hydrate inhibitors or operating outside the hydratestability zone by insulating the pipeline and/or active heating. These techniques are not always economical and in some cases are not practical for deepwater operations, long tiebacks, or aging reservoirs with high water cuts. The industry needs new and novel flow-assurance techniques to address these challenging conditions. The approach presented in this paper is a wet cold-flow-based method in which gas-hydrate management rather than... 

Displacement experiments of the gas-oil system are performed on long core scale models by varying the petrophysical properties and flowing conditions. Experiments are conducted in situations where capillary, gravity and viscous forces are comparable. From oil production history and picture analysis, the threshold for the stability is determined. The experimental findings are comparable to the results of a gradient percolation theory. The effect of destabilized front velocity on relative permeability and residual saturation is investigated. The relative permeabilities determined by using analytical and numerical approaches indicate that higher displacement velocity leads to a higher gas... 

After a brief review of the global gas flaring and venting in oil industries including the emission of air pollutants and greenhouse gases and the amount of energy resources wasted, the focus is on Iran as a major oil producing and the world's third largest gas flaring country. Gas flaring is also practiced in natural gas industries, petroleum refining and petrochemical plants, although the level of emission is very low compared with emissions from oil production. The historical emission of these gases globally and Iran specifically, geographic location of emission sources, composition of gases, environmental impacts of gas flaring and the current and future projects to mitigate emissions... 

A hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD) method was used to prepare Fe-Cr thin film on Si substrate. The produced layers were used as catalysts for growing carbon nanotubes (CNTs) from liquid petroleum gas (LPG) at 825 °C by thermal CVD (TCVD) method. To characterize the obtained catalysts or CNTs, X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and Raman spectroscopy were used. CNTs were grown on HFCVD derived Fe-Cr catalyst with the LPG as carbon source successfully. It was found that an annealing process on catalysts enhances the surface concentration of Cr atoms and reduces the sizes of catalyst particles. The... 

In drilling oil wells a system of complex fluids and chemical additives is used. Losses of these fluids in the well during drilling or disposal of them in well site could transfer pollutants to groundwater. In the present study a number of well sites, located in South of Iran, were studied to indicate types and magnitude of various pollutant materials that remain in the environment undestroyed and have considerable impacts on the underground water resources. Hydrocarbons used in Oil Base Muds (OBM) that can't be biodegrade readily in nature found to be the most severe pollutant material caused by disposal of Drilling Mud and Cuttings. Volume of drilling waste for these oil wells evaluated to... 

In this work, an ultrasound experimental setup was designed to investigate the feasibility of using low-frequency ultrasonic waves as a substitute to reduce the consumption of chemical demulsifiers in the pretreatment of crude oil. The experiments were planned to study the effects of irradiation time, ultrasonic field intensity and initial water content on the efficiency of separation. The results of experiments showed that by selecting a proper irradiation time and field intensity, it is possible to decrease the usage of demulsifiers by 50%. Moreover, a population balance model was proposed to explicate the experimental data. A hybrid coalescence model was developed to determine the... 

Recently, colloidal gas aphron (CGA) fluids technology has been employed to drill depleted oil and gas reservoirs. Almost all reported experience on CGA fluids were conducted at ambient conditions, and little attention has been paid on the behavior of CGAs at high pressures which is more close to real conditions. In this study, high pressure experiments were conducted by using High Pressure Microscope cell to visualize/monitor the behavior of CGAs at elevated pressures. Single bubble behavior and bubble size distribution (BSD) of CGAs were investigated under different scenarios of pressure change. Results of experiments revealed that BSD of CGAs is controlled by the path of pressure changes,... 

Metal forming processes are widely used in industrial productions, automobile bodies, food industries, oil refineries, and liquid and gas transmission systems. Analyzing these processes is very important to reduce wastes and optimize the processes. Study of some main factors such as physical and mechanical properties of material and its formability, die geometry, die material, lubrication and pressing speed has been the topic of many research projects. In this paper, forming limit diagrams (FLDs) for LC and ULC steels and the effect of different parameters like the work-hardening exponent, n, and the plastic strain ratio, r, on these diagrams have been evaluated and simulated using... 

Persian Gulf is a semi-enclosed highly saline reverse estuary that is exposed to the risk of oil spills in offshore oil and gas activities. In the early 2000s, a specific version of NOAA's Trajectory Analysis Planner (TAP II) was developed for Persian Gulf to assist regional organizations in preparing oil spill contingency plans. In this research, a new stochastic model is developed to cover the limitations of TAP II. The new model is based on an advanced trajectory model, which is now linked with high resolution spatiotemporal data of the wind and sea current. In a case study, the developed model is compared with TAP II, and evaluated by multiple tests designed for analysis of uncertainty,... 

Different causes lead to accidental oil spills from fixed and mobile sources in the marine environment. Therefore, it is essential to have a systematic plan for mitigating oil spill consequences. In this research, a general DSS is proposed for passive and active response planning in Persian Gulf, before and after a spill. The DSS is based on NOAA's advanced oil spill model (GNOME), which is now linked with credible met-ocean datasets of CMEMS and ECMWF. The developed open-source tool converts the results of the Lagrangian oil spill model to quantitative parameters such as mean concentration and time of impact of oil. Using them, two new parameters, emergency response priority number (ERPN)... 

Gas condensate production using technology of multi-stage hydraulically fracturing in shale gas condensate reservoirs' horizontal wells is a new topic of unconventional resources studies. Thus, shale gas condensate as a new source of energy can be considered as an important issue for development and further studies. In this work, a semi-analytical solution of gas and oil two-phase flow is presented for pressure transient analysis (PTA) and rate transient analysis (RTA) of a shale gas condensate reservoir's production data. Fluid flow assumption here is flow in a pseudo triple-porosity porous media, which are matrix, natural fractures and adsorbed gas. Adsorbed gas is a form of gas in porous... 

Abstract: This study investigates the catalytic activity of mixed–metal oxide nanoparticles with different surface acidities on asphaltene adsorption followed by catalytic oxidation–decomposition. Three different types of mixed–metal oxide nanoparticles (CeNiO3, CeCaO3 and CeZrO4) were synthesized, and their size, structure, and acid properties were characterized by field–emission scanning electron microscopy (FE–SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), the high–resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area measurement and ammonia temperature-programmed desorption (NH3–TPD). Asphaltenes were extracted... 

As expounded, the precipitation and deposition of asphaltene particles in pipelines has been proved to be the most challenging flow assurance problem due to its unknown and complex behaviors. In this work, a new multicomponent, multiphase and dynamic tool was developed to model the aggregation and deposition of asphaltene particles in a bulk medium. The multiphase and dynamic asphaltene deposition tool, shortened as MAD-ADEPT is, in fact, a modified version of the previously developed ADEPT. The new tool was developed to make the asphaltene deposition and aggregation concepts in oil production wells more predictable. To tackle the complexity of the asphaltene problem, a bespoke algorithm was... 

A three-dimensional multi-component transport model in a two-phase oil-water system was developed. The model includes separated terms to account for the dispersion, convection, injection, growth and death of microbes, and accumulation. For the first time, effects of both wettability alteration of reservoir rock from oil wet to water wet and reduction in interfacial tension (IFT) simultaneously on relative permeability and capillary pressure curves were included in a MEOR simulation model. Transport equations were considered for the bacteria, nutrients, and metabolite (bio-surfactant) in the matrix, reduced interfacial tension on phase trapping, surfactant and polymer adsorption, and effect... 

Separating produced water is a key part of production processing for most crude oils. It is required for quality reasons, and to avoid unnecessary transportation costs and prevent pipework corrosion rates caused by soluble salts present in the water. A complicating factor is that water is often present in crude oil in the form of emulsions. Experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of ultrasonic fields in demulsifying crude oil emulsions using novel pipe-form equipment. A horn-type piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer with a frequency of 20 kHz and power ranging from 80 W to 1000 W was used for experimental purposes. The influences of the intensity of ultrasonic fields,... 

An effect-directed analysis (EDA) of fresh and artificially weathered (evaporated, photooxidized) samples of North Sea crude oil and residual heavy fuel oil is presented. Aliphatic, aromatic, and polar oil fractions were tested for the presence of aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) agonist and androgen receptor (AR) antagonist, demonstrating for the first time the AR antagonist effects in the aromatic and, to a lesser extent, polar fractions. An extension of the typical EDA strategy to include an N-way partial least-squares (N-PLS) model capable of relating the comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC × GC-TOFMS) data set to the bioassay data... 

Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) refers to the process of using bacterial activities for more oil recovery from oil reservoirs mainly by interfacial tension reduction and wettability alteration mechanisms. Investigating the impact of these two mechanisms on enhanced oil recovery during MEOR process is the main objective of this work. Different analytical methods such as oil spreading and surface activity measurements were utilized to screen the biosurfactant-producing bacteria isolated from the brine of a specific oil reservoir located in the southwest of Iran. The isolates identified by 16S rDNA and biochemical analysis as Enterobacter cloacae (Persian Type Culture Collection (PTCC)... 

In this work, a new model based on the multilayer adsorption kinetic mechanism and four material balance equations for oil, asphaltene, gas, and water phase has been developed to account for asphaltene deposition in porous media under dynamic conditions and the model was verified using experimental data obtained in this work and also with those reported in the literature. The results showed that the developed model based on multilayer adsorption kinetic mechanism can correlate more accurately the oil flooding experimental data in comparison to the previous models based on the mechanical plugging mechanism, in particular in carbonate core samples. Also, a series of experiments was carried to... 

In the present work the production of biodiesel using bitter almond oil (BAO) in a potassium hydroxide catalyzed transesterification reaction was investigated. The BAO was obtained from resources available in Iran and its physical and chemical properties including iodine value, acid value, density, kinematic viscosity, fatty acid composition and mean molecular weight were specified. The low acid value of BAO (0.24. mg. KOH/g) indicated that the pretreatment of raw oil with acid was not required. The fatty acid content analysis confirmed that the contribution of unsaturated fatty acids in the BAO is high (84.7. wt.%). Effect of different parameters including methanol to oil molar ratio (3-11.... 

The potential of an indigenous bacterial strain isolated from an Iranian oil field for the production of biosurfactant was investigated in this study. After isolation, the bacterium was characterized to be Paenibacillus alvei by biochemical tests and 16S ribotyping. The biosurfactant, which was produced by this bacterium, was able to lower the surface tension of media to 35. mN/m. Accordingly, thin layer chromatography (TLC) and FT-IR has been carried out to determine compositional analysis of the produced biosurfactant. After all the tests related to characterization of the biosurfactant produced by the isolated bacterium, it was characterized as lipopeptide derivative. The combination of...