EFFECTIVENESS OF PVP AND CMA AS HYDRATE INHIBITOR

Flow assurance mean to ensure the successful and economical flow of hydrocarbon stream from reservoir to the point of sale. In other term, it is actually multiphase transport, which covers the transmission of oil, gas and water in the same pipeline from the reservoir to processing plant. Somehow, gas hydrate may occur in the flow line due to variation of pressure and temperature. Nowadays, thermodynamic hydrate inhibitor (THI) had been used widely in order to prevent this gas hydrate problems. Methanol is one of the well known chemical inhibitor that had been used for many years due to its effectiveness and proven tract-record. Nevertheless, using methanol is very expensive and not cost-effective. This is because methanol needs to be added at high concentration which is 10-60 wt% in aqueous phase. So, in order to overcome this problem, researched activity has concentrated on the development of low dosage hydrate inhibitor (LDHI) which in this case is kinetic hydrate inhibitor (KHI). KHI is very cost effective and environmentally acceptable compared to THI. The objective of this study is to study the effectiveness of Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and Calcium Magnesium Acetate (CMA) as KHI. Besides that, another objective is to study the effective concentration of PVP and CMA as KHI.
The project title: “Effectiveness of PVP and CMA as hydrate inhibitor” is to determine the ability and the effectiveness of Kinetic Hydrate Inhibitor (KHI) in delaying crystal growth of hydrate formation. This project starts by doing some research on journals in order to get reliable references regarding the topics. Then, this project will involve a lot of lab work and experiment in order to test the effectiveness of PVP and CMA as hydrate inhibitors. Equipment used in this project is the High Pressure Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) & Calorimetry - HP Micro DSC. Originally designed under a IFP (Institut Français du Petrole) license to study the gas hydrates formation and dissociation, the high pressure version of the μDSC7 evo offers unique capabilities on the market: on a wide temperature range, from the subambient temperature of -45°C up to 120°C, it is possible to carry out high sensitive DSC measurements under high and very high pressure, up to 1000 bars (14 600 psi). Experiments under gas supercritical conditions, such as CO2, are also available.