ABSTRACT
Flow assurance is critical to the life cycle of oil and gas field. Flow assurance focuses on the whole engineering and production life cycle from the reservoir through refining, to ensure with high confidence that the reservoir fluids can be moved from the reservoir to the refinery smoothly and without interruption. Byproducts like, wax, asphaltenes, hydrate, emulsion, scaling, and corrosion due to reservoir souring are important challenges encountered during the production and injection phases. Wax present in crude oil and condensate consists of straight, branched, and cyclic paraffin. At high temperatures, waxes are dissolved in oil, but at low temperatures, waxes crystallize starting with the component with the highest carbon number. The chapter briefly discusses the laboratory tests to provide the data for engineering studies and usage of models. The last residue of precipitated paraffin redissolving in liquid is the wax disappearance temperature.
