Continuous Salt Monitoring: From Wellhead to Refinery
Continuous salt monitoring is essential from the wellhead to the refinery. The new MOD-4100S Salt-in-Crude Analyzer provides real-time data on salt content during production, transport, blending, and before and after the desalter. This ensures optimized desalting efficiency, protects CDU and downstream units from corrosion and fouling, and increases refinery profitability by reducing downtime, energy, and chemical costs.
With its ATEX ExD approval and integrated sampling and conditioning system, the MOD-4100S delivers robust, field-ready performance — safeguarding assets and margins across the entire crude oil chain.
Continuous monitoring of salt content at all stages — upstream, midstream, and downstream — is therefore critical to safeguard assets, optimize operations, and maximize profitability.
Upstream: Managing Salt at the Source
Crude oil is extracted from wells that contain not only hydrocarbons, but also water, gases, and inorganic salts. When crude is produced as an emulsion with brine, salts enter gathering lines, separators, and storage tanks. If not addressed at this stage, they initiate corrosion in pipelines and storage vessels and set the stage for downstream processing challenges.
Early salt monitoring at the wellhead with on-line analyzers enables operators to:
- Detect salt content in real time before crude enters gathering and export pipelines.
- Optimize initial separation and dehydration processes, preventing corrosion in offshore and onshore infrastructure.
- Improve commercial value of crude streams, as buyers impose strict limits on BS&W and salt levels.
Desalting: The Refinery’s First Line of Defense
Before crude reaches the CDU, salts must be removed. Two primary methods exist: chemical desalting and electrostatic desalting, with electrical desalting being the industry standard. Both methods use hot water as the extraction agent.
