Preparation of a crude oil demulsifier from industrial wastes

Demulsifiers are very important additives in the oil industry due to their crucial role in solving the water – in – oil emulsions problem. Inventing new demulsifiers have gained a lot of researchers’ attention; factors like efficiency, versatility, cost and safety were taken into consideration when preparing new demulsifiers.Recycling industrial waste materials has many great benefits economically and environmentally and in this research methyl methacrylate has been prepared from the depolymerization of Plexiglas wastes, Plexiglas is the trade name for poly methyl methacrylate sheets. The (DM) which refers to depolymerized methyl methacrylate was purified and tested by using many methods such as boiling point, infrared spectroscopy; refractive index and gas chromatography GC to determine its purity. Then the depolymerized methyl methacrylate was used in an oil demulsifier mixture in treating water in oil emulsions in crude oil and HFO which refers to heavy fuel oil. The crude oil samples were taken from Al – Hilla 2 power plant while the HFO samples were taken from the South Baghdad 2 power plant. In this research, the spectr oil test had been used after treating the crude oil to determine the demulsification process by measuring the Na and K salts concentration.The purity of the DM was 96.4% according to the GC test. The spectroil results showed that when the DM was used in a demulsifier mixture with water miscible chemicals and chemicals with sufficient solubilities like acrylic acid and butyl acrylate the best demulsification results were obtained (when using 30% wash water) for both crude oil and heavy fuel oil (HFO) with a demulsifier concentration ranging from (200 – 300) ppm.