INFRA Technology has received preliminary results of an independent miscibility testing, commissioned by Gazprom neft. Test results confirm that the synthetic oil, produced using INFRA’s GTL technology, mixes well with mineral oil. Adding up to 15% of synthetic oil improves the characteristics of the mineral oil, whilst maintaining a stable homogeneous mixture; and higher proportion of synthetic oil (15 to 50%) affects the structure of the oil’s colloidal disperse system, but it does not upset the phase equilibrium.
The company considers positive test results as yet another confirmation of the possibility of mass application of INFRA’s technology for utilization of associated gas by converting it into synthetic crude and mixing it with mineral oil in the pipeline.
INFRA intends to commercialize serial small-scale 100 barrel-per-day modular units associated gas utilization. The first prototype will be commissioned in late 2014.
It should be noted, that these were the first tests for the miscibility of synthetic and mineral oil done in Russia, and conducted in accordance with the Russian standards applicable to mineral oil.
Partly, the objective of the test was to address a frequently expressed concern that the addition of synthetic oil with different composition may disrupt the relative equilibrium of mineral oil, which was formed as a complex system of several hundred hydrocarbons over a very long period of time.
Full report is available here.