VOLUME 14, NUMBER 1
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2000
© Copyright 2000 American Chemical Society
Special Section on Petroleum Phase Behavior and Fouling International Conference on Petroleum Phase Behavior and Fouling From the well through the refinery, the production, transportation, and processing of petroleum and natural gas can be hindered and interrupted by the deposition of insoluble solids and the formation of water emulsions. These insoluble solids can be asphaltenes, wax, diamondoids, sulfur, and gas hydrates. Both insoluble solids and nearly insoluble solids can greatly stabilize petroleum-water emulsions and prevent the separation of these immiscible liquids. The cost of these problems to the oil and gas industries is in the multibillion dollars per year range in lost production, energy loss, and cleaning costs. Unfortunately, it has been common for the industry to accept these costs as the price of doing business in oil and gas with little hope for their elimination. Consequently, an international conference was held March 14-18 in Houston as part of the 1999 Spring National Meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers to discuss new advances in the understanding of the phase behavior of these complex systems and in applications to solve deposition, or fouling, problems. In the eleven sessions, authors discussed how to detect the presence of these phases, why they formed, how to predict when they form, how to mitigate their deposition, and what their influence is on other petroleum properties, such as viscosity. To communicate and record the accomplishments in science and application discussed at this international conference, expanded versions of a subset of the conference papers are published in this special issue of Energy & Fuels. Since petroleum contains millions of different molecules without a repeating group and is a hybrid of a solution and a colloidal dispersion, understanding its phase behavior should be expected to be a challenge. The surprise is that relatively simple models can describe its phase behavior. When this is coupled with improved experimental methods, significant progress has been made and applied to the mitigation of petroleum fouling. Using chemical, physical, mechanical, and design methods, solutions to fouling problems have been demonstrated in wells, pipelines, heat exchangers, furnace tubes, and refinery units. Although much more understanding is needed, sufficient progress has been made so that severe petroleum fouling should no longer be an acceptable practice. Irwin A. Wiehe Soluble Solutions Conference Chair EF990205X 10.1021/ef990205x CCC: $19.00 © 2000 American Chemical Society Published on Web 11/24/1999
