Elemental Mercury Partitioning in High Pressure Fluids Part 1: Literature Review and Measurements in Single Components

Mercury in its elemental form is naturally present in most reservoir fluids. The presence of mercury can lead to serious operational and safety/health problems. Knowledge of the maximum solubility of elemental mercury with temperature and pressure in reservoir fluids is important to avoid mercury dropping out during processing operations, as mercury is naturally present in hydrocarbon deposits. In this work, a new experimental approach is presented to determine the mercury content in high pressure gas and liquid systems. Mercury solubility in methane, ethane, propane, nitrogen and carbon dioxide over a wide range of temperature and pressure (243.15–323.15K and up to 20 MPa) have been measured. An extensive literature review has been conducted on the solubilities of mercury in gases and liquid hydrocarbons. A critical evaluation of the literature data has been conducted to identify any inconsistencies in the reported data. The new experimental data generated in this work along with the literature data have been used to tune the binary interaction parameters of the Peng-Robinson and the Soave-Redlich-Kwong equations of state between mercury and the mentioned compounds.