Prevention of Refinery Tower Plugging by Residual Oil Gellant Chemicals in Crude-Pilot Plant Evaluation of Alternative Oil Gellants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction CIPC Paper 2004-0491 described refinery plugging caused by volatile phosphorus components originating from phosphate ester oil gellants. Also documented were two successful field trials of new phosphonate ester oil gellants that were shown to address this problem. CIPC Paper 2005-0432 presented results of additional field testing of phosphonate ester gellants directed at optimization of cost and performance. In addition to the phosphonate ester systems previously tested, a new modified phosphate ester system has become available. The modified phosphate ester also reduces volatile phosphorus according to D86 ASTM distillation testing. However, several questions require further investigation. One of these is the comparative ability of phosphonate and modified phosphate esters to control volatile phosphorus and related tower fouling under more representative conditions. The D86 distillation procedure used to evaluate volatile phosphorus to date has a 250 °C end point. The actual bottom temperature in the towers is approximately 340 °C. Also, fluids typically have 2 to 4 minutes residence time in the tower bottoms. However, the pot temperature in the D86 distillation is not specified as part of the procedure and may exceed 340 °C in some instances. Based on observed smoking of the oil samples in some distillations, the oil may be cracking. As a result, results may be inaccurate and difficult to reproduce. In addition, esters may decompose at elevated temperatures through a hydrolysis mechanism if water is present. Steam is injected into the bottoms of the towers, serving as a source of water. However, the D86 test methodology does not include addition of an aqueous phase. Another continuing area of concern has been organic halide formation under distillation tower conditions. Although no organic halides were detected in the flowback of the two initial field trials reported in CIPC 2004-049,1 further testing under more realistic conditions is required. It has been hypothesized that on the larger scale of an actual distillation tower, water hydrolysis may occur. This could result in localized areas of acidity and causticity. In the presence of acid at elevated temperatures, halogenation reactions could occur if halogen ions, such as chloride ions, are present. Any carry over of salts not removed in the de-salters, could server as this source of halide ions. To address these questions in the most meaningful way possible, full-scale pilot plant testing will be conducted over several days with flowback captured after actual fracturing treatments. Fouling of distillation tower trays will be measured as well as fouling of the packing material. In addition, any changes in operating parameters such as rate, temperature, or pressure during each test will be noted because these could also be indicative of fouling. Three full-scale pilot evaluations will be conducted using actual flowback fluids from fracturing treatments conducted with three different oil gellants:Convention phosphate ester currently in use. The purpose of this test is to serve as a blank for comparison and for validation of test methods. We expect tower fouling with this product. If no fouling occurs, the test method is invalid.Modified phosphate with reduced volatile phosphorus according to D86 test methodologies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".