🛢️ Oil & Gas / Petrochemical
Crude oil heating, heavy fuel conditioning, tank farm heating and pipeline viscosity management.
Oil & Gas / Petrochemical — DSI Applications
Crude oil heating, heavy fuel viscosity reduction and pipeline conditioning
Heavy Fuel Oil & Crude Heating
Heavy fuel oil, bitumen and crude oil blends have very high viscosity at ambient temperature, making them impossible to pump without heating. Storage tanks and transfer pipelines require the oil to be maintained above 60–90°C for fuel oil or 90–120°C for bitumen and heavy crude. Tank-mounted DSI spargers provide uniform, efficient heating of the full tank volume by circulating steam through the oil. Unlike electric immersion heaters or steam coils, DSI spargers have no hot surfaces that can cause coking or fouling of heavy hydrocarbons.
Pipeline Viscosity Conditioning
Long-distance pipelines carrying heavy crude or fuel oil experience temperature drop due to ground cooling, raising viscosity and pumping energy. Inline DSI heaters at intermediate pump stations reheat the fluid to maintain target viscosity throughout the pipeline. The inline system adds minimal pressure drop and requires no special infrastructure beyond a steam supply and the DSI unit itself.