Acid Removal From Saline Media

Naphthenic acid (NA) is also known as organic acid within the crude. The
presence of NA is a major concern in oil and gas industry due to its ability to cause
corrosion. The corrosion cause by NA can damage the production and refinery
equipment as well as transportation and storage facilities in oil and gas industry. The
concentration of acid in the crude can be determined by the value of Total Acid Number
(TAN).
In this project, the author used crude oil provided by PETRONAS for
experiments. The author will study on the rate of acid extraction using Ionic Liquid (IL).
Ionic liquids refer to salt exist in a liquid state over a wide range of temperature. In this
project, the author used two different based IL to extract acid in the crude oil sample.
Other than that, the author used different sea water volume to study its effect. The
project started by doing some research on journal and research paper which related to
the topic investigated. In order to obtain result and confirmation regarding the
hypothesis or theory made a lot if lab work and experiment are done. There are (3) three
main processes involve in this project; Reaction, Extraction and Settling (R: E: S)
process. The experiments are done under various parameters to study the effect of
varying the parameters on extraction efficiency. Under these parameters set-up and
chemicals used, the author will study the rate of acid removal from saline media.
The results of this project show that ionic liquid can be used to extract organic
acid from the crude oil. The extraction efficiency is ranging from 50% - 80%. Other than
that, increase in salinity’s concentration show decrease in TAN of crude oil. The acid
extraction is proven to be more efficient under specific parameters; solvent as the
solvent, time taken for R: E: S process is 30:60:60 and 800 rpm. Based on the gas
chromatography result, the amount of hexanoic acid extracted is more than dodecanoic
acid.