ABSTRACT
Pipelines transport natural gas from the wellhead to gas processing plants and crude oils to storage tanks. The first step in refining of crude oils is desalting which is required to remove water soluble inorganic salts and metals. The chemical demulsification process requires the addition of demulsifiers to destabilize the emulsions. Crude oil is a mixture of compounds having different boiling points and distillation is the simplest way to separate them into different fractions. The distillation of crude oil occurs in large fractionating towers.
