Talk:Scale inhibitor
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| Thread title | Replies | Last modified |
|---|---|---|
| Any new chemistries for scale control/inhibition? | 1 | 15:13, 27 July 2013 |
SI is a pretty established bussiness in oil&gas industry. Does anyboday know if any new chemistry in the trend or can provide some published literature?
The basic scale inhibition chemistries (Polymers and Phosphonates) that are used within the oil and gas industry have not significantly changed over the years. There have been subtle changes to well established chemistries and these have been brought about by several things (genuine innovation, a better understanding of a need for compatibility, the changes in environmental regulations and the discovery of, or advances in production from, more HT/HP fields).
One of the major focus for scale inhibitor development was to look at 'tagging' of inhibitors (specifically polymeric scale inhibitors) to allow ease of detection for monitoring of scale inhibitor returns within produced water. Not all of these 'tagging' techniques are successful with the 'tag' not truly associated with the polymer.
Clariant have developed a patented polymerisation technique and now have a range of phosphorous-functionalised polymers (based on well established polymer species) which have the phosphorous incorporated as part of the polymer backbone and these products have shown not only improved detectability but also improved scale inhibition performance and adsorption, resulting in being qualified as 'best-in-class' chemistry by several North Sea operators.
Speaking about new chemistry for scale inhibition is a very open question as it highly depends upon which species of scale you are referring to. For calcite and sulphate based scales the chemistry is well established, however, when looking at sulphide based scale there has been very little focus or development over the years and this problem is now becoming more of an issue (deeper, hotter wells). Clariant have worked a lot on this recently and have developed chemistry which acts as a dispersant for sulphide scales. This chemistry has been shown in third party testing to offer a significantly improved inhibition performance towards sulphide scales compared with the established chemistries which have been used over the years. Their use was based on their performance towards more common carbonate and sulphate scales despite the fact that the performance towards sulphide scales was actually quite poor. Development of the chemistry has offered a step change in the performance achievable but research will continue to look at how we can improve this further.
A brief note on OLI ScaleChem and the other software packages being discussed, these are not scale prevention software programmes but scale prediction programmes. They are used to evaluate the risk of scale based on a variety of inputs. They are a key part of scale management process in that they highlight the potential scaling risks that may be faced within a production system.
