Interfacial Contamination Between Batches of Crude Oil Due to Dead-Legs in Pump Station Piping

Abstract

Some oil pump station design layouts may contain multiple dead-legs. During the transportation of heavy crude through the pump station, these dead-legs will be filled with this crude. When a light crude batch is introduced next into the pipeline, following the heavy crude ahead, two phenomena will occur. First, contamination between batches at the interface of the two crudes will occur due to axial turbulent diffusion along the length of the pipeline itself. Second, as the light crude flows through the pump station and passes by each dead-leg containing still heavy crude from the preceding batch, the heavy crude trapped in these dead-legs will start to drain out into the passing light crude in the main run. This causes further contamination and spreading of the mixing zone between the two batches. These two different sources of contamination are addressed in this paper with the objective of accurately quantifying the extent of the contamination, with particular emphasis on the second phenomenon which could cause appreciable contamination particularly for large size and number of these dead-legs. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model has been developed to quantify the drainage rate of the contaminating crude into the main stream and its impact on widening the mixed zone (contamination spread) between the two batches. Two drainage mechanisms of the heavy crude in the dead-legs into the main stream of the light crude have been identified and quantified. The initial phase is a gravity-current-induced outflow of the initially stagnant fluid in the dead-leg, followed by a subsequent draining mechanism primarily induced by turbulent mixing and diffusion at the mouth of the dead-leg penetrating slightly into the dead-leg. It was found that the second mechanism takes a much longer time to drain the first, and that the break point in time where drainage switches from a predominantly gravity current to a turbulent diffusion appears to be at a specific time normalized with respect to the length of the dead-leg and the gravity current speed. The results show a consistent trend with actual interface contamination data obtained from the Keystone 2982 km pipeline from Hardisty (Canada) to the Patoka Terminal (U.S.A.).