Any latest development in the world of asphaltene inhibitor and asphaltene in general?
Manfred Eigner
Owner, ME Consultancy Services (MECS) and Oil & Energy Consultant
Dear Scott, I would like to comment on your remarks. Although I am convinced that you are doing your utmost in finding a suitable chemical solution for the apparent asphaltene deposition problem in the industry, it is the approach of the chemical industry that bothers me most. As we all know that the problem is caused mainly by the pressure reduction, hence change in molar volume of the solute, the method of identifying a suitable chemical solution of the problem is inadequate. May be your company is following a new testing method that mimics the actual pressure reduction of live crude oil better then the existing ones. In that case I am keen to find out and my comments are premature. In my reply to Humberto I was only reflecting my experience that goes back to 2010-2012. And the result of my literature study was not very favorable. I would be very pleased if you want to share with me what your company is doing in this field.
Regards Manfred
Scott Lamb
Corrosion Inhibitor Chemical Manufacturer
Dear Manfred, I agree with your assessment, but think that perhaps by "chemical industry" we mean different things: I mean chemical manufactures capable of producing large scale volumes of molecules. You might mean chemical service companies that cater to the oil industry. In the first case, unless a chemical molecule is specifically identified, and the market is well defined, then it is difficult to imagine investing resources to produce the chemical. This has been, and still appears to be the status quo, as each geologic formation seems to produce its own, unique asphaltene for which only a customized dispersant formulation seems effective for each application.
Prof. Dr. Hans-Jörg Oschmann
Prof. II Colloid and polymer chemistry at NTNU
Hello Mike, interesting you only found such low performance in the literature. From an application viewpoint I always found asphaltenes significantly less challenging than wax since the new chemistries developed over the last ten years have been more than sufficient to deal with all asphaltenes problems I have encountered (including such severe environments as asphaltenes precipitation in de-ethanizers. Some products perform better then others on specific crudes but there is a couple of chemistries which so far have always come out amongst the top three. So I have never seen it as an "unmet need" for the industry. However there is still room for improvement on the application side. F.I. the MIC of asphaltenes inhibitors is still higher then for comparable Scale Inhibitors impacting squeeze lifetime.
