Journal of Petroleum & Environmental Biotechnology

Avoiding gas hydrate problems in Qatar oil and gas industry: Environmentally friendly solvents for gas hydrate inhibition

2^nd World Congress on Petrochemistry and Chemical Engineering

October 27-29, 2014 Embassy Suites Las Vegas, USA

Nabila Mohamed, Santiago Aparicio, Bahman Tohidi and Mert Atilhan

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Pet Environ Biotechnol

Abstract:

Qatar's one of the biggest problem in processing its natural resource, which is natural gas, is the often occurring blockage in the pipelines caused due to uncontrolled gas hydrate formation in the pipelines. Several millions of dollars are being spent at the process site to dehydrate the blockage safely by using chemical inhibitors. We aim to establish national database, which addresses the physical conditions that promotes Qatari natural gas to form gas hydrates in the pipelines. Moreover, we aim to design and test novel hydrate inhibitors that are suitable for Qatari natural gas and its processing facilities. From these perspectives we are aiming to provide more effective and sustainable reservoir utilization and processing of Qatari natural gas. In this work, we present the initial findingswhich deals with the natural gas hydrate formation characteristics of Qatari type gas in both experimental (PVTx) and computational (molecular simulations) methods. We present the data from the two fully automated apparatus: a gas hydrate autoclave and a rocking cell. Hydrate equilibrium curves including growth/dissociation conditions for multi-component systems for several gas mixtures that represent Qatari type natural gas with and without the presence of well known kinetic and thermodynamic hydrate inhibitors. Ionic liquids were designed and used for testing their inhibition performance and their DFT and molecular modeling simulation results were also obtained and compared with the experimental results. Results showed significant performance of ionic liquids with up to 0.5% in volume with up to 2 to 4 0 C inhibition at high pressures.

Biography :

Nabila Mohamed holds a MSc. Degree in Environmental Engineering from Qatar University(2014)and B.Sc. degree in Chemical Engineering(2012). Nabila worked as graduate assistant at gas processing center in Qatar University and has developed her research skills by working on several research projects in the Chemical Engineering Department at Qatar University. Her main research interests are in gas hydrates, wastewater treatment processes, and carbon capture and storage.