Method Development for Studying the Performance of Synthetic and Commercial Scavengers in H2S Removal of Crude Oil

Hydrogen sulfide is one of the most important impurities in crude oil and natural gas, which is required to be separated before crude refining or gas transport. From the viewpoint of environmental and quality control aspects, many problems rise due to organosulfur compounds available in crude oils especially in oil refining and oil product consumption. In spite of a variety of methods such as stripping and extraction requiring long term programs and high cost processes, chemical scavengers are recently introduced as short-time solutions with a suitable economic potential—especially in sweetening processes of gas and oil industry. One of the methods used for removing hydrogen sulfide is using chemical scavengers. Nowadays, the present technology is ideally used for upgrading gas and crude oil for export purposes. Unfortunately, no standard method has been established for evaluating H2S scavengers yet. Herein, conventional methods for evaluating H2S scavengers are initially studied due to lack of standard methods. Owing to the disadvantages of the conventional methods, a novel method (named RIPI Method) is described to evaluate the performance of synthetic and commercial H2S scavengers in crude oil matrices. The method is basically so dynamic and rapid that at least 20 real samples can daily be analyzed with a relative error of 2.4%.