Abstract

Mercury is not only considered a toxic pollutant in the environment but also a corrosive
element in processing equipment. The presence of mercury in oil and gas can increase
the exposure risk to field operators and can cause serious corrosion problems. Fur-
thermore, it may cause catalyst poisoning and deactivation; these could lead to long,
unplanned shutdowns which are neither operationally nor financially desirable as they
negatively impacts the equipment life and profit. Therefore, producing oil and gas from
reservoirs that contain mercury is a challenging task. This work is concerned with the
thermodynamic modelling of mercury distribution in oil and gas process facilities. The
main objectives of this research are to investigate the distribution of mercury in oil and
gas process facilities in order to eliminate mercury impact and unplanned shutdowns.
In addition it aims to identify the best location of mercury removal units in an effort
to alleviate mercury exposure risks and damage. This work allows the prediction of
the thermodynamic behavior of elemental mercury in a wide variety of solvents, hy-
drocarbon mixtures, and operating conditions where experimental data are unavailable.
This was successfully achieved by using two approaches; introducing binary interac-
tion parameters between mercury and other molecules, and modelling mercury atoms
as an associating atoms. The effectiveness of the developed models is validated against
experimental data.
It has been observed that the process operating conditions play an important role in
mercury distribution in various phases. Reducing the operating pressure and increasing
operating temperature allows more heavy hydrocarbons to flash out carrying over more
mercury to the gas stream. This increases the possibility of mercury accumulation in
the gas processing units. The presence of heavy hydrocarbons in the produced water
streams increases the solubility of elemental mercury in these streams. This negatively
impacts the biosphere due to mercury pollution.