Industry Perspectives

What is the Best Way to Remove Water from Large Oil Systems?

By Lubrication Expert • 26 May 2022

Rafe sits down with Peter Dufresne – Executive Vice President at EPT Clean Oil to discuss all things regarding varnish and varnish remediation.

What is the best way to remove water from large oil systems? Dry gas blankets work by flowing Nitrogen across the oil reservoir headspace – this is a highly effective means of extracting water from the oil system. The humid air can then be vented out through the breather elements.

Rafe Britton: It’s interesting to look at the rate of water ingress versus what the systems are designed for. The top end of Australia and Southeast Asia have such high humidity that even with some of the vacuum dehydration technologies, large skids still really struggle to keep up. The rate of ingress is so much higher because they’re working in a hundred percent humidity almost all of the time.

Peter Dufresne: That is the simplest thing to solve. Put a dry gas blanket or a small nitrogen generator on there and reverse the cycle. We can make nitrogen wherever, we’re breathing 70% nitrogen right now and to put that on top of lubricants and humid environments is gold.

You can triple, quadruple the life of lubricants with that one step alone. I was at a site near the ocean at a big power plant and they manifold their breather elements. There were six of them in parallel because they only last three or four days.

Just reverse the flow of this. Put dry gas blanket on there and exhaust out the breather element, preferably with nitrogen because it’s inert. It regenerates the breather elements too.

There are a thousand things every company can do to be more sustainable and to improve actually the bottom line. You just need some small victories. Putting nitrogen on top of hydraulic systems or lube oil systems in humid environments is the biggest no-brainer in the filtration industry could ever do.

Lubrication Expert