Introduction: The Unseen Backbone of Industry
Chemical injection pumps are everywhere—yet they’re so ingrained in industrial operations that we hardly notice them. From oilfields to water treatment plants, they quietly handle some of the toughest jobs, ensuring processes run smoothly and efficiently. But the reality is that the world they operate in is changing rapidly, and with that comes new challenges.
Whether it’s managing corrosion in pipelines or preventing hydrate plugs, these pumps are tasked with protecting critical infrastructure and ensuring operational safety. And while they’ve done this job reliably for decades, recent changes in the chemicals they handle have begun to expose cracks in the system.
What Is a Chemical Injection Pump?
Chemical injection pumps deliver precise amounts of chemicals into industrial systems. These chemicals perform critical roles, such as:
- Preventing Corrosion: Protecting equipment like pipelines and tanks from costly degradation.
- Flow Assurance: Preventing hydrate plugs or other clogs that can halt production.
- Enhancing Separation: Aiding in the efficient separation of oil, water, and gas.
Their applications are endless:
- In oil and gas, they inject methanol to prevent hydrate formation or corrosion inhibitors to protect pipelines.
- In water treatment, they ensure accurate dosing of disinfectants or pH balancers.
- In agriculture, they deliver fertilizers or pesticides with precision.
- Without these pumps, many industrial operations would grind to a halt, or critical assets would degrade over time.
How Chemical Injection Pumps Work
Chemical injection pumps exist to solve problems in industrial processes. Their primary job is simple but critical: inject precise doses of chemicals to ensure operations remain efficient, safe, and productive. Let’s explore the details of how they work, what drives them, and why choosing the right pump matters more than ever.
Power Sources and Their Impact
Chemical pumps are powered in three main ways: solar, pneumatic, or electric. Each has its pros, cons, and unique challenges, especially in extreme environments like -40°C winters in Canada or +65°C summers in desert oilfields.
1. Solar-Powered Pumps
- Advantages:
- Renewable and cost-effective in remote areas.
- No grid power requirement, eliminating a significant cost implication.
- No hydrocarbon emissions, ideal for environmental sustainability.
- Challenges:
- Cold Environments: Solar batteries lose up to 50% of capacity in sub-zero conditions, requiring insulated enclosures or heaters.
- Low Sunlight Conditions: Cold + Lack of sunlight creates a unique challenge to replenish batteries. Lack of sun means less energy to refill increasing needs for deeper autonomy. Cold can diminish the capacity as stated above, coupled with lack of sunlight it may require quite an infrastructure to maintain operation.
- Hot Environments: High temperatures degrade battery life and reduce solar panel efficiency by up to 20%. Excess sunlight while abundant in energy potential often comes with heat. While charging a battery, a byproduct of charging is heat. Couple an already hot battery, with hot environment while trying to charge likely will damage the batteries. Further, most batteries have distilled water in them, and that water will boil off or evaporate under such conditions.
- Real-World Impact: A solar system running Pump A (6 amps per actuation) in northern Canada might need 15 batteries and 36 solar panels to ensure 5 days of autonomy. In contrast, Pump B (250mA while injecting, or 20mA on standby) like LCO’s CROSSFIRE contactless, brushless pump could operate on just 1 battery and 2 panels.
2. Pneumatic Pumps (Air or Gas-Driven)
- Often powered by compressed air or gas from the wellsite.
- Pros:
- Simple design with no reliance on electricity.
- Explosion-proof, making them safe for hazardous environments.
- Usually well understood by industry, lack of electrical components mean just mechanical repairs required.
- Cons:
- Gas-driven pumps may emit hydrocarbons during operation, raising environmental concerns.
- Freezing temperatures can cause hydrate formation, leading to failures.
- Air can create condensation if not coupled with an air-drying system, or contingencies to deal with potential liquids.
- Wet Fuel Gas which is typical from a wellhead when utilizing wellhead gas is problematic for pneumatic instruments. Couple that with cold weather and you have a recipe for damaged equipment.
3. Electric-Driven Pumps
- Powered by AC motors
- Challenges:
- High cranking amps during each actuation strain batteries in cold weather.
- High Electricity consumption, which leads to very high electricity costs during operation.
- Are almost always less than 10% efficient, and as a result are usually running constantly.
- Electric components can degrade faster in extreme heat and humidity.
- AC Motors have unique challenges around classification in areas that may have hydrocarbons present. Typically must be mounted or installed in a general-purpose area, leading to longer cables, instrument air lines.
- Pros:
- As a result of grid power and AC 120V+ available solar challenges are eliminated.
- AC Power lends itself to higher horsepower, which in turn can deliver larger amounts of chemical or air compression pressures/volumes.
Real-World Energy Comparison
Let’s compare three pumps operating in northern Canada at -40°C, with 4 hours of sunlight and 1,000 actuations per day:
Pump Type | Daily Power Usage | Batteries Needed (5 Days) | Solar Panels Needed |
High Amp Pump (6A) | 144 kWh | 15 | 36 |
LCO Continuous Pump (250mA) | 6 kWh | 1 | 2 |
Why It Matters:
- When looking at the cost of electricity, or the availability, consumption is a big deal.
- Infrastructure costs for batteries, housings, panels, etc. all are needed, and each item contributes to the autonomy.
- Depending on your site conditions can drive the incremental costs upwards in a significant way!
Traditional pumps experience cranking amps during actuation, drawing large amounts of energy in short bursts. This not only strains batteries but also requires larger, more expensive solar and battery systems.
LCO Technologies’ Advantage:
Our pumps eliminate inrush currents entirely. Instead of pulsing energy, they inject continuously at 250mA, delivering unmatched efficiency and reliability. In extreme conditions, this can mean the difference between a system that works and one that constantly fails.
Example: Utilizing a 1000 PSI Injection point pressure on a pipeline with a desire to inject 25L/Day (6.6 Gal/Day) on a 24VDC system results in 0.251 A (251mA) of power consumption while injecting. To put that into perspective, that’s roughly 6 Watts of power. That’s less than an everyday LED light bulb utilized in your home!
Be clear, that’s both the mechanical cost and the electrical consumption of the smart controller combined. When its not running and waiting for a startup condition? Just 20mA, just under 0.5W on standby.
A Relatable Analogy: It’s Just Like Your Car
So, all this discussion around power types for pumps, why is it important? Well, I like to think about it like my car. Sometimes I drive fast, sometimes I only drive a little. Sometimes I pretend I am a race car driver. All those situations have different impact on my car, some use more energy, some put additional wear and tear on the overall performance and components. Ideally, I drive the same all the time, but that’s just simply not how it goes. The traffic, my urgency, or where I need to be determined what the operating conditions will be. But like any machine, it has moving parts that need maintenance. Does that make it flawed? Of course not—it’s just the nature of moving machinery.
Now imagine going for an oil change, and the technician asks:
- “What type of oil do you want?”
- “Synthetic or conventional? 5W-30 or 10W-40?”
Most of us freeze because we don’t know the answer, I just drive my car… I am not a mechanic and understand the differences in oil types, I just want the oil that works. This can be said of all of us and our career paths, we understand and know what needs to be done in our field of choice. We can’t be experts in all fields, its just simply not a part of our everyday.
Chemical injection pumps face the same challenge. Operators are concerned with ensuring the well is flowing, the chemical pump is injecting, there are no hydrates happening and everything is working as it is supposed to be. Operators manage these systems but aren’t experts on chemical types, soft goods, and material compatibility with said chemical, or what implications of operating conditions have on the equipment. They need pumps that just work—regardless of changing conditions.
The Changing Landscape of Chemical Injection
Chemical companies are creating ever more complex blends to differentiate their products and deliver greater value. The world is consistently looking for ways to do more with less, to improve operations, deliver consistent and incremental value. As far as the Oil & Gas sector has been, these chemicals have been somewhat consistent for a long period of time. With the industry looking to innovate, improve performance and the industry competing for business, the organizations are creating new complex chemistry blends that can achieve multiple tasks with a single chemical blend where individual chemicals for individual tasks were the norm previously. These new blends—while innovative—often come with unintended consequences for the equipment that handles them:
- Corrosion inhibitors now serve multiple functions, but their additives can degrade traditional packings and seals. The chemical makeup has become increasingly acidic, and complex. Such chemicals can create melting, deformation, or significantly diminished life expectancy of plungers, packings, check valve seats, and other types of soft goods.
- Methanol, once a simple solution for hydrate prevention, now can contain additives like 0.5% inhibitor that make compatibility for soft goods a guessing game.
- On-Site Blending: Some organizations have even embarked upon saving on chemical storage and injection systems by having a single tank on site and blending two or more separate chemicals in a single tank.
- This situation can be quite frightening!
- LCO has encountered situations where the blending of said chemicals, oxidization, and the settling of the new combined product results in Silicates. Think, GLASS that is being pulled into the chemical injection pump shredding traditional packing sets in hours if not days.
This new world of Chemical Injection and the compatibility of the equipment moving the chemical has been a race to find a solution that is robust, simplistic, ideally a catch all situation and of course be cost effective.
The Ripple Effects
As chemical blends change, so do the demands on pumps:
- Frequent Failures: Traditional seals and packings deteriorate faster, leading to leaks and downtime.
- Operational Frustration: Operators struggle to find compatible components, causing inefficiency and waste. Frequent installation of ‘whatever they have with them’ to limp along until their next site visit with the proper tools and repair goods.
- Costs of Goods: Even if compatible components are found, they are typically quite expensive, to the point that organizations require special workorders for repairs and minimal inventory of said goods. This typically results in at least 2 trips to the site to repair, 1 to investigate, understand & 2 The return trip with the expensive components to do the physical repair as operations will typically not always carry these goods with them.
- Rising Costs: Unplanned maintenance and lost production can cost tens of thousands per incident, not to mention the cost of the chemical itself or the potential need for cleanup.
How LCO Technologies Solves These Challenges
At LCO Technologies, we don’t just build products—we solve problems.
1. One and Done Packing
- What It Fixes: A single, universally compatible packing replacement ‘cartridge’ style packing. This unique offering has yet to find a chemical that it can’t stand up to. Don’t believe us, try out a sample using our ChemKit.
- Why It Works: Compatible with a wide range of chemicals, we’d love to say ALL Chemicals, but we simply haven’t tested it with everything yet!
Our testing has shown that we outperform everything else on the market by a significant margin.
2. Innovative 2-Piece Suction Check Valve
- What It Fixes: Allows for the use of inert Teflon O-rings without deformation, solving chemical compatibility issues.
Traditional suction checks are designed to take flexible O-rings like Viton, Kalrez, Buna etc. as they can be easily inserted without damaging the integrity of the O-ring
Our Unique 2 Piece suction check allows for the most chemically compatible (Teflon) 0.12 O-ring to be inserted without deformation, or complex tools. Teflon also is a hardened material and only becomes more difficult in cold weather, rendering it completely ineffective on traditional suction checks.
- Why It Works: Plug-and-play design ensures easy, reliable repairs. Teflon is cheap, effective, and the most chemically compatible and now it can be used without any complexity during installation.
3. XF2 O-Rings A Proprietary LCO Blend
- What It Fixes: When Teflon is not a viable option, and other brands are very expensive, LCO has created our XF2 O-Ring. To date, we have yet to find a chemical blend that it can’t handle. It is easily outperforming industry-standard materials at a fraction of the cost.
- Why It Works: Provides a universal solution for evolving chemical challenges.
Now, that’s a bold claim but we can tell you that previously we used our XF1 on all chemicals. But as we discussed above on the changing landscape of chemical injection, eventually something caused the XF1 to under perform to operations expectations. That led us to the XF2, and when the same happens, you can count on LCO to create an XF3 due to our rigorous internal R&D processes.
The Path Forward
The chemical injection industry is evolving, and the challenges are real. But with the right tools and technologies, you can stay ahead. At LCO Technologies, we’re here to help you navigate this rapidly changing landscape, ensuring your operations are simpler, more reliable, and cost-effective.
When you’re ready to stop worrying about your pumps and start focusing on your business, contact us because we are more than happy to prove it to you. Better yet, we are hard at work finding the best-in-class partnerships for each geographic region for local service and support 24/7, local inventory and a real person that answers the phone to help with things don’t go as planned.
Click here to learn more about our CROSSFIRE Products.