Remoção conjugada de metais e óleo de água produzida

Petroleum can be associated or not with natural gas, but in both cases water is always present in its formation. The presence of water causes several problems, such as the difficulty of removing the petroleum from the reservoir rock and the formation of waterin-oil and oil-in-water emulsions. The produced water causes environmental problems, which should be solved to reduce the effect of petroleum industry in the environment. The main objective of this work is to remove simultaneously from the produced water the dispersed petroleum and dissolved metals. The process is made possible through the use of anionic surfactants that with its hydrophilic heads interacts with ionized metals and with its lipophilic tails interacts with the oil. The studied metals were: calcium, magnesium, barium, and cadmium. The surfactants used in this research were derived from: soy oil, sunflower oil, coconut oil, and a soap obtained from a mixture of 5wt.% coconut oil and 95wt.% animal fat. It was used a sample of produced water from Terminal de São Sebastião, São Paulo. As the concentration of the studied metals in produced water presented values close to 300 mg/L, it was decided to use this concentration as reference for the development of this research. Molecular absorption and atomic absorption spectroscopy were used to determine petroleum and metals concentrations in the water sample, respectively. A constant pressure filtration system was used to promote the separation of solid and liquid phases. To represent the behavior of the studied systems it was developed an equilibrium model and a mathematical one. The obtained results showed that all used surfactants presented similar behavior with relation to metals extraction, being selected the surfactant derived from soy oil for this purpose. The values of the partition coefficients between the solid and liquid phases " D " for the studied metals varied from 0.2 to 1.1, while the coefficients for equilibrium model " K " varied from 0.0002 and 0.0009. The removal percentile for oil with all metals associated was near 100%, showing the efficiency of the process

Avaliação e modelagem da absorção de H2S do gás natural em coluna de leito estagnado

Natural gas, although basically composed by light hydrocarbons, also presents contaminant gases in its composition, such as CO2 (carbon dioxide) and H2S (hydrogen sulfide). The H2S, which commonly occurs in oil and gas exploration and production activities, causes damages in oil and natural gas pipelines. Consequently, the removal of hydrogen sulfide gas will result in an important reduction in operating costs. Also, it is essential to consider the better quality of the oil to be processed in the refinery, thus resulting in benefits in economic, environmental and social areas. All this facts demonstrate the need for the development and improvement in hydrogen sulfide scavengers. Currently, the oil industry uses several processes for hydrogen sulfide removal from natural gas. However, these processes produce amine derivatives which can cause damage in distillation towers, can cause clogging of pipelines by formation of insoluble precipitates, and also produce residues with great environmental impact. Therefore, it is of great importance the obtaining of a stable system, in inorganic or organic reaction media, able to remove hydrogen sulfide without formation of by-products that can affect the quality and cost of natural gas processing, transport, and distribution steps. Seeking the study, evaluation and modeling of mass transfer and kinetics of hydrogen removal, in this study it was used an absorption column packed with Raschig rings, where the natural gas, with H2S as contaminant, passed through an aqueous solution of inorganic compounds as stagnant liquid, being this contaminant gas absorbed by the liquid phase. This absorption column was coupled with a H2S detection system, with interface with a computer. The data and the model equations were solved by the least squares method, modified by Levemberg-Marquardt. In this study, in addition to the water, it were used the following solutions: sodium hydroxide, potassium permanganate, ferric chloride, copper sulfate, zinc chloride, potassium chromate, and manganese sulfate, all at low concentrations (»10 ppm). These solutions were used looking for the evaluation of the interference between absorption physical and chemical parameters, or even to get a better mass transfer coefficient, as in mixing reactors and absorption columns operating in counterflow. In this context, the evaluation of H2S removal arises as a valuable procedure for the treatment of natural gas and destination of process by-products. The study of the obtained absorption curves makes possible to determine the mass transfer predominant stage in the involved processes, the mass transfer volumetric coefficients, and the equilibrium concentrations. It was also performed a kinetic study. The obtained results showed that the H2S removal kinetics is greater for NaOH. Considering that the study was performed at low concentrations of chemical reagents, it was possible to check the effect of secondary reactions in the other chemicals, especially in the case of KMnO4, which shows that your by-product, MnO2, acts in H2S absorption process. In addition, CuSO4 and FeCl3 also demonstrated to have good efficiency in H2S removal