Oilfield Scale Formation: Dynamics of Sweet/Sour Corrosion Scales

During my Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) final year project at the Photon Science Institute, University of Manchester, I used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to investigate the initial stage of corrosion scale formation in a pipeline environment on Fe(110) surface. The work concerns the oilfield scale formation under sweet/sour corrosion conditions, in an attempt to obtain a fundamental understanding of surface processes at the nanometre scale. Three corrosion precursor molecules are investigated in this project, CO$_2$, H$_2$O and H$_2$S. These molecules can change the surface differently and drastically even at low exposure. These fundamental understanding provided in this work could help us to prevent or slow down the corrosion rate from the very beginning stage; or accelerate the formation of scales to reduce the rate of further corrosion and prevent the breakdown of scales.

Image: Right side is the STM image of ordered structure on Fe(110) surface from CO$_2$. Left side is drawn in the model.