Crude-water emulsions are present in oil extraction wells. To transport these, it is necessary to break the emulsion. There are several ways to achieve this; one of them is the heating of the fluid. Shell and tube heat exchangers are often used, which are difficult to transport due to their large dimensions, which increases the cost of operation in new drilling. In this work, it has proposed as heating option the use of plate heat exchangers, which have considerably smaller dimensions making them portability possible and so achieving satisfactory results. An optimization was made by response surfaces to find an ideal PHE (Plate Heat Exchanger) geometry to operate with heavy crudes. The results show that with the same transfer surface, the PHE achieves a higher outlet temperature than the STHE (Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger), while in pressure drop the latter has a higher efficiency