Effect of Temperature on Asphaltene Precipitation in Crude Oils from Xinjiang Oilfield

During the production of crude oil, asphaltenes are prone to precipitate due to the changes of external conditions (temperature, pressure, etc.). Therefore, a series of research studies were designed to investigate the effect of temperature on asphaltene precipitation for two Xinjiang crude oils (S1, S2) so as to reveal the mechanism of asphaltene dissolution. First, the changes of asphaltene precipitation were intuitively observed by using a microscope. The results demonstrated that the asphaltene solubility increased with the increase of temperature and the dispersion rate of asphaltene particles increased with the decrease of particle size. Second, the variation of asphaltene precipitation with temperature was quantified by a gravimetric method. The results suggested that the different asphaltenes showed different sensitivity to temperature within the temperature range 25-120 °C. Third, a hypothesis was proposed to explain these results and proved that the asphaltene aggregate structure was an important factor for asphaltene stability. The crystallite parameters of asphaltenes were obtained by X-ray diffraction (XRD) to describe the structural characteristics. The results revealed that the layer distance between aromatic sheets (d ) of asphaltenes derived from S1 oil and S2 oil were 0.378 and 0.408 nm, respectively, which implied that the asphaltene aggregates derived from S2 oil were looser than those of S1 oil. Therefore, high temperature could facilitate the penetration of resins into asphaltene aggregates and ultimately improve the dispersion of asphaltenes. Finally, molecular dynamics (MD) simulation was used to verify the conclusions. Based on the molecular dynamics method, asphaltene aggregate models were developed. The compactness and internal energy of each model were calculated. The results showed that the asphaltene dispersion capability was proportional to the porosity and internal energy.