Separation of water from water-in-heavy-oil (W/O) emulsions has been a costly problem.Due to the high viscosity of heavy oil, increasing the temperature of the emulsion has been one of the most common methods of separating water from W/O emulsions. The other methods include adding demulsifiers and using coalescence media. For the treatment of water in oil emulsions, providing a strongly water-wet coalescing media is the key for the coalescence of water droplets when the oil is the continuous phase.Various pack materials and methods have been tested for coalescence media by many researchers with no success due to the fact that water-wet material packed in a coalescence column is not able to remain water-wet in a heavy oil environment.In this study the principle of capillarity and the mechanism of wetting film in porous media are applied in designing the coalescence media. Water-wet porous particles are column. Using the coalescing column reduced water content in the heavy oil by 38%, 89%, and 93%, compared to the water contents reached in the separation with demulsifier dosages of 50, 100, and 150ppm, respectively, without using the column. These results indicate that the effect of adding a coalescing column to water separation is significant, as compared to just using a demulsifier in gravity separation. More importantly, flow through the coalescing column could reduce the water content in the heavy oil to a very low level (<1.0%) and, at the same time, reduce the consumption of demulsifier.iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS