OPTIMIZACIÓN DEL TRANSPORTE POR OLEODUCTO DE CRUDO PESADO CASTILLA

• Main Authors: César Augusto García Chinchilla, Fabio Enrique Hernandez, Guillermo Cruz, Lilia Rodriguez, Luz Edelmira Afanador, Omar Caceres Rodriguez
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Industrial de Santander 2019-09-01
• Series: Revista Fuentes El Reventón Energético
• Subjects: Heavy crude oil; Dilution; pipeline; Naphta; Segregation; Pipeline hydraulics; rheological behaviour
• Online Access: https://revistas.uis.edu.co/index.php/revistafuentes/article/view/1148/1540

Due to the increase in reserves and production of heavy crude oil in Colombia´s Llanos basin, and the decline of production of light conventional crude oil used traditionally as diluents, and as result of a comprehensive technical - economic evaluation, ECOPETROL S.A decided to implement a scheme of heavy oil transport by pipeline, using naphtha as diluent. By using the basic equation of flow of fluids, a methodology to estimate the maximum flow rate of transport of a particular pipeline for a specific fluid was developed. This tool was used to determine the flow regime in which the Castilla viscous crude oil can flow in laminar regime under the same conditions of pressure drop and flow rate than a low viscosity fluid flowing in turbulent flow. This way, the naphtha requirement was minimized. By using this algorithm, based in the explicit equation of Churchill and Usagi for the estimation of friction coefficient, the optimum viscosity for the Castilla oil ¿ naphtha blend was found to be close to 300 cSt at 30°C for the Apiay - Porvenir pipeline, the mail bottleneck in Ecopetrol pipeline infrastructure for the evacuation of heavy oil from Colombia´s Llanos basin. The evaluation also included the development and implementation of scheme of segregation of heavy and light crude oil. The opportune implementation of the segregated scheme of handling and transport of Castilla crude oil diluted with naphtha ECOPETROL was able to increase Castilla crude oil production from 40 to 75 thousand barrels of oil per day (KBPD) in a 5 year span. The exports of ¿Castilla blend¿ average 2.5 million barrels per month during 2008, becoming Colombia´s main exportation product.