Effects of asphaltene, resin and crude oil type on the interfacial tension of crude oil/brine solution

In recent years, the behavior of crude oil interfacial tension (IFT) as a function of salt concentration have been investigated. The results found in literature are highly controversial, thus the current experimental study aimed to clarify the reasons behind this by developing a methodology based on extracting asphaltene and resin from three different crude oils and performing elemental analysis on them. In addition, the effect of salinity on the IFT of three studied crude oil was compared with the synthetic crude oil consisted of different weight percent (wt%) of asphaltene and resin in toluene. The obtained results revealed that the IFT of crude oil as a function of salinity depended not only on the wt% of asphaltene and resin fractions but also on the aromaticity of asphaltene and resin. In fact, as the aromaticity of asphaltene increased, the performance of asphaltene decreased as a function of salinity while the aromaticity of resin led to a revers trend on IFT variation.