Determination of the Composition of Commingled Crude Oil Streams by HPLC-SEC with UV and IR Detection

Abstract

An analytical method utilizing the HPLC-SEC fingerprints of crude oils derived from UV-DAD and IR detectors is presented. It can determine rapidly and accurately the contribution of different crude oils in pipeline mixtures and in commingled production streams.

The method makes use of differences in the distributions of characteristic groups present in the petroleum mixtures throughout the entire molecular weight range to identify and quantify the constituents. An overdetermined system of equations, having as unknowns the mass fractions of the oils in the mixture, is solved iteratively to minimize the error between the signal of the mixture and of the reconstituted.

Case studies are presented to show the successful application of the method in reservoir and production engineering applications.