Absorption kinetics of mercury (II) chloride into mono-ethylene glycol (MEG) solution

Abstract

Different mercury species have been found in the oil and gas reservoirs. Dynamic absorption of mercury (II) chloride (HgCl2) into solutions of mono-ethylene glycol (MEG) is reported in this work. It was observed that absorption of HgCl2 into MEG solutions was comparable to the absorption in pure water and the effect on MEG was not seen for MEG concentrations of 2–30 v/v%. The absorption flux was mainly affected by the absorption temperature and the concentration of HgCl2 in the gas phase. Utilisation of several mercury analysis techniques such as flow injection mercury spectroscopy (FIMS), inductively couple plasma-mass spectroscopy (ICP-MS), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and Raman spectroscopy show that no interactions between HgCl2 and MEG were detected for the test parameters studied. The findings from this work helps to improve the knowledge on the behaviour of HgCl2 within natural gas processing facilities, especially during transportation in pipelines and the MEG regeneration process.