Presentation Profile
Development of Ion Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry Technique for Squeeze Management
Currently Scheduled: 1/19/2018 - 11:00 AM - 11:25 AM
Room: Exhibit Hall
Main Author
Lei Cheng - Ecolab
- Christopher Durnell - Ecolab
- Emerils Casado-Rivera - Ecolab
Abstract:
Aminophosphonates are effective scale inhibitors used to prevent and control scale problems in oilfields. It is significant to measure the accurate and precise scale inhibitor residuals to manage the squeeze treatment. The prevalent analytical technique inductively coupled plasma Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-EOS) is simple and used to quantify aminophosphonate by measuring the phosphorus content in the sample. However, it is not able to differentiate phosphonate mixtures in the commingled sample. In this work, we developed ion chromatography and triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (e.g. IC-MS and IC-MS/MS), which have high sensitivity and specificity to quantify several phosphonates in the system. Ion chromatography efficiently separates phosphonate ions from other salt ions, because phosphonates are multivalent anions which have the stronger interaction with the column than the monovalent chloride anions or other anions. At an early stage, the IC-MS method has been developed to differentiate two phosphonates in the squeeze treatment. As the increase of the complexity of the squeeze treatment, more advanced technique, IC-MS/MS has been developed to differentiate four phosphonates in the commingled sample. The innovative technique can detect the low level of phosphonate in the mixture at 1 ppm. The technique has been validated using synthetic brine and field brine. The IC-MS/MS method is a powerful technique in squeeze scale management. In future, further analysis of real field samples of the squeeze treatments of multiple wells will be performed.
