By Peter Weiss
Oil drillers often heat crude oil or dilute it with gasoline to make it runny enough to flow through pipelines to refineries. Now, physicists find that a few seconds to minutes of exposure to a modest magnetic or electric field, instead of the standard treatments, sharply reduces crude oil’s viscosity for hours at a time.
The new oil-thinning technique could reduce the difficulty and cost of pumping crude oil, particularly from offshore rigs that feed pipelines passing through deep, cold waters, the scientists say.