Study on the Effectiveness of Ionic Liquid as Low Dosage Hydrate Inhibitor (LDHI) for Flow Assurance in Pipeline

This research project is an experimental approach to study the effectiveness of ionic liquids as low dosage hydrate inhibitors (LDHI) for flow assurance in pipelines. In addition, this project is also aimed to gain a better understanding about gas hydrates and choosing new potential ionic liquids as LDHI. Gas hydrates are solid crystalline compounds formed by water and molecules like natural components at low temperature and high pressure conditions. Hydrates formation often occur and block gas pipelines which causes production failure and safety hazards.
The conventional method to prevent the formation of gas hydrates is by using large quantities of thermodynamics inhibitors, which is expensive and dangerous to the environment. Thus, suitable new class of ionic liquids such as low dosage hydrate inhibitor(LDHI) that are strong and effective needs to be discovered to replace the conventional method. The criteria of ionic liquids were studied – stabilities, hydrophilic, tuneable organic cations and anions and extremely low vapour pressures.
In this study, parameters such as kinetic rate and induction time need to be experimentally considered and investigated by using High Pressure Kinetics Measurement (HPKM) for bulk volume. Currently for HPKM, the temperature at 273.65 K and pressure at 35bar is selected to be operating condition for the experiment of hydrate formation as data were recorded every second by data acquisition system. This experiment was continued by adding LDHI (0.1wt%, 0.5wt%, 1.0wt %) and using different pressures (25bar, 30bar and 35bar) to test the effects. However, 10.0 wt% high concentration of EMIM BF4 is used for the study of ionic liquid effectiveness as thermodynamic inhibitors.
The findings of this work will contribute to a more environment friendly and economical hydrate inhibitors for usage in the oil and gas industrials.