Review of paraffin control and removal in oil wells using Southwestern Petroleum Short Course searchable database

The SWPSC Association, Inc. is a non-profit educational organization. The objective of the SWPSC is to disseminate technical knowledge about existing oil field problems, innovations/improvements in different areas of petroleum engineering, on-going research projects, and field-proven techniques to efficiently and economically solve various field problems. As of date, forty-six volumes of the SWPSC conference proceedings have been published over the past 46 years, comprising of 1641 conference proceedings. An initiative is undertaken to archive the SWPSC conference proceedings in the electronic format. A detailed methodology is outlined to archive the SWPSC conference proceedings from paper to the electronic format and to develop the SWPSC searchable database with the use of previously available computer software. The SWPSC database, developed in this work, is tested for its efficiency to retrieve the technical papers on paraffin control and removal methods that have been presented over the past 46 years of the SWPSC annual conferences. An overview of mechanical thermal, chemical, and other published methods for paraffin treatment is provided after reviewing the 24 out of 36 retrieved SWSPC papers. In addition, the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) image library is used to retrieve technical papers on paraffin treatment methods from the SPE collection of technical papers. After reviewing 19 out of 310 SPE technical papers, a summary of thermal, and chemical methods for paraffin control is outlined. The paper retrieval efficiency of both of these technical paper databases is compared and analyzed for retrieving papers related to paraffin control and removal methods.