Experimental Investigation and Modeling the Effect of CO2 and Rich Gas on the Kinetics of Asphaltene Precipitation from Live Oil

Asphaltene precipitation from reservoir fluids during oil production is a serious problem resulting in plugging of the formation, wellbore and production facilities. Generally, asphaltene precipitation has only been investigated from thermodynamic approach in literature, and it assumed that precipitation is relatively fast and has no kinetik effects. Without a good understanding of the associated kinetic effects during the precipitation of asphaltenes, the thermodynamic models can provide misleading predictions for asphaltene stability. So, it should be analyzed from two points of view, thermodynamic and kinetics stability. In this study a molar rich gas and CO2 programmed titration technique was used to evaluate the kinetics of gas-induced asphaltene precipitation from Iranian reservoir oil under isothermal and isobaric initial reservoir conditions in a solids detection system (SDS) and with kinetics of polymerization assumption for reaction between asphaltene and gas, the kinetics parameters of reaction is determined. The results show that asphaltene precipitation occurs in 0.9 mol of rich gas and 0.3 mol of CO2 injected per one mol of reservoir oil. Also, the reaction order of CO2 & rich gas is 2.7 times more than reaction order of asphaltene. So in gas injection, the rate of asphaltene precipitation is highly dependant to the volume of gas.