ABSTRACT

A challenge facing offshore oil production is wax deposition.  It leads to increases in operational and remedial costs while suppressing oil production.

Accumulation of wax deposits in transport pipes and process equipment is an old and expensive problem in the petroleum industry and thus, this project aims at investigating the alternatives used for preventing wax formation in production wells and on the inner walls of subsea crude oil pipelines. The different approaches to this problem that will be studied include: heating/thermal insulation, pigging, internal coatings and chemical inhibitors.  Emphasis was placed on chemical inhibitors and a performed experiment was adopted to investigate the effectiveness of Toluene and Benzene, as a chemical inhibitor on a Crude Oil sample. From the results obtained it can be concluded that the cloud point of the samples decreased as the concentration of chemical inhibitor added was increased. The cloud point of the crude oil sample decreased by 9.8 °C and by 7.9 °C respectively when the Benzene and Toluene inhibitors were added at a maximum concentration of 1500 ppm.

A comparative study on heat management systems in flow lines was conducted from top  publishers  to determine the level of work done by researchers in the last decade, the figures from the study showed the need for scientific research in the field of active heating as it seems to be the new way forward to tackle flow assurance problem. Additionally, a review was implemented to ascertain the likely advantages and drawbacks of each technique, its limitations concerning field applications and then recommend the most suitable. The active heating system gives the most cost-effective solution for subsea deep-water fields