Crude oil is the miracle fuel that has changed our lives in more ways than we can imagine. From jet travel to synthetic fiber for moon landing, from granules that make pet jars and car tyres to vaseline and wax, a number of byproducts are synthesized from crude oil.
It is the exploration and production of crude oil that is the first step that makes our world what it is today but despite its presence and utility in almost every aspect of life, exploration and processing of crude oil remains an extremely complicated and critical process.
Oil fields are generally spread over large areas and therefore a large number of oil wells are drilled to reach underground reservoir of crude oil.
Raw crude oil, apart from being a high viscosity fluid in itself; also contains large quantities of sand, water and evolved gases and this makes pumping out of crude oil from oil wells, an extremely difficult and energy intensive task.
In a process called field gathering where crude oil is collected from multiple oil wells before being transferred for refining. Field gathering system transfers raw crude oil containing higher percentages of sand‚ water or evolved gas from the wells to the processing plant, main storage facility or shipping point. The field gathering station uses Radial system where multiple pipelines connect to single header pipeline due to very large size of oil fields.
The crude oil requires boosting at high pressures from the oil well to the upstream delivery point due to large distance, viscosity & composition of media to overcome the friction losses. Also, the raw oil requires blending with condensates to stay within the maximum pressure limits of the gathering lines as the media can be contaminated with solids‚ produced water‚ salts and waxes etc.
Field gathering lines requires installation of energy efficient pumps which can accommodate wide range of flow rates at high pressures due to the changing output from the field. This is where Roto Pumps plays its part. Specially designed to handle crude oil, Roto pumps are use to transfer of high pressure raw crude oil from oil wells, blending of crude oil with condensate, also for receiving oil at upstream units (Oil processing Plant, Storage Tank or Shipping Unit).