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Dehydration and Desalting

Crude oil treatment involves dehydration to remove water and desalting to eliminate salt, which can cause corrosion. Dehydration aims to separate free water and break emulsions using de-emulsifiers, while desalting is necessary when salt content exceeds 20 PTB. Electrostatic desalting is commonly employed in both oil field production and refineries to address these issues.

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28 views8 pages

Dehydration and Desalting

Crude oil treatment involves dehydration to remove water and desalting to eliminate salt, which can cause corrosion. Dehydration aims to separate free water and break emulsions using de-emulsifiers, while desalting is necessary when salt content exceeds 20 PTB. Electrostatic desalting is commonly employed in both oil field production and refineries to address these issues.

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dishnadinesh268
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Dehydration and desalting

Dehydration
• The preliminary crude oil treatment, prior to the refining, involves
• oil dehydration followed by desalting.
• Crude oil, once produced, may contain up to 15% water, which may
• exist in an emulsified form.
• A dual function is the main objective of
• the dehydration step: to ensure that the remaining free water is
totally removed from the bulk of oil and to apply whatever methods
are necessary to break the oil emulsion.
• In general, free water removed by gravity in the separator is limited to
large water droplets.
• Oil stream leaving the separator would normally contain free water
droplets that are smaller in size, in addition to the water emulsified in oil.
• Chemicals act as de-emulsifiers; once absorbed on the water-oil interface,
they will rupture the stabilizing film surrounding the oil drops, hence the
emulsions are broken.
• The removal of salt from crude oil is recommended for refinery feed
• stocks, if the salt content exceeds 20 PTB (pounds of salt, expressed
• as equivalent sodium chloride, per thousand barrels of oil).
• Salt in rude oil exists as dissolved inorganic compounds in the
remnant water found in the oil.
• This remnant water is known as brine. These salt drops
are dispersed within the oil.
It presents serious corrosion and scaling problems and must be
removed by desalting.
Electrostatic desalting is generally used for oil field production
dehydration and desalting or at oil refineries.
• Amount of salt found in crude oil is attributed to two factors:
• • The quantity of remnant water that is left in oil after normal
dehydration.
• The salinity or the initial concentration of salt in the source of
• this water.
• Single stage and two stage desalting

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