The relation between water film drag reduction rate and water cut in super heavy oil transportation

The transportation efficiency of super heavy oil pipeline can be increased by using the water film drag reduction technology. The relation between water cut and drag reduction rate based on water film transportation technology is studied for super heavy oil with flow behavior at the temperature from 70℃ to 85 ℃ and water cut from 4% to 12% through a 200-meters-long experiment pipeline with 108.6 mm. In order to reduce error, the experiment pipeline is divided into three segments, in which the pipe segment 1, pipe segment 2 and pipe segment 3 represent that of 0~100 m, 100~200 m and 0~200 m in the 200-meter-long pipeline. Experiment results indicate that the water cut will raise in the certain range and the drag reduction rate for super heavy oil based on water film transportation will increase when the flow rate of oil is controlled in 0.05~0.11 m/s in the precondition of not emulsified crude oil. The increasing tendency of drag reducing rate is most significant when the water cut of oil is from 4% to 6%, and the drag reducing rate will maintain at 90% when the water cut is more than 6%. The maximum drag reducing rate in experiment section 2 can reach 95% due to the relatively low temperature drop.