Publications

There are many cases in oil fields where it found that the oil has high pour point. This condition may result in a serious problem during said oil is transported from the production well to the gathering station and from the gathering station to the export station. Due to heat transfer from surrounding, the oil temperature would drop below its pour point before it reached the destination. To overcome this problem, heater systems are normally installed at different parts of the pipeline. The objective of installing these heater systems would be to maintain the oil temperature above its pour - point, so that the oil may flow safely to the destination point. In this study, a high - pour point oil transportation system with heat system installation is studied. Pressure drop and temperature drop calculation along the pipe is done using a non-isothermal model that is solved implicitly using Newton - Raphson method (Mucharam and Tobing, 1994). Other than that, models to calculate the heat and pump are developed, as well as a model to calculate cost for economic assessment. High pour point oil transportation system software was developed based on these models at Research Consortium OPPINET (Optimization on Gas and Oil Transmission and Distribution Pipeline Network) in Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). One illustrative case was simulated using hypothetical data. Based on this simulation result, it may be concluded that the OPPINET software may be used to optimize transportation system for oil with high pour point.