Flow Assurance & Operability

Introduction

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Overview
1. Flow Assurance
2. Subsea oil and gas fields

3. Field Development
4. Introduction to flow assurance challenges

5. Fluid properties

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Flow Assurance
Flow assurance refers to ensuring successful and economical
flow of hydrocarbon stream from reservoir to the point of sale.

The primary goal of flow assurance is to ensure production of

hydrocarbons in a safe and reliable way and ensure
operability through the entire life of field.

Flow Assurance developed because of subsea development

including shorter and longer flowlines transporting of
unprocessed multiphase flow.
In order to guaranty feasible, safe and cost effective
production for subsea oil and gas field Flow Assurance is an
extremely diverse subject matter.
In the system design for a subsea oil and gas development
Flow Assurance take critical part in all phases of the project.
Flow assurance challenges increase with sea depth, tie-back
distances, harsh environment as well as more complex
reservoir fluids.
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Subsea oil and gas fields

Characterized by a large network of wells, flowlines and
manifolds
Subsea oil and gas field

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Shallow water: shallow water depths where bottomfounded facilities like jackup drilling rigs and fixed offshore
structures can be used
Deepwater: refer to offshore projects located in water
depths greater than 200 (1000) m sea depth. Floating
drilling vessels and floating oil platforms are used, and
unmanned underwater vehicles are required as manned
diving is not practical.

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Subsea gas and oil fields

The development of subsea oil and gas fields requires
specialized equipment.

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must be reliable enough to safe guard the environment

make the exploitation of the subsea hydrocarbons
economically feasible

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Drivers for field development of subsea systems

The main motivation for the development of an oil/gas
field is in general to maximize production.
Main parameters for selection of system solution are
technical feasibility, safety, reliability and cost.
The flow assurance specialist must be able to design
multiphase systems to ensure the safe, uninterrupted
transport of reservoir fluids to the processing
facilities.
Keywords for subsea design are robustness,
simplicity and efficiency.

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The equipment needs to operate for decades with a

minimum of down time or required maintenance.

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Types of fields

Fields are divided between types of production fluid

Oil or gas field: Characterized by the gas oil ratio (GOR)

Production fluid will be multiphase incorporating; oil, gas

and water

The fields are also divided into

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Old (Brown) fields

New (Green) fields

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Challenges related to new fields

A trend the recent period of years are development of fields
characterized by

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very deep water

extremely deep reservoirs

extremely shallow reservoirs

long tie-ins

heavy oil with high viscosity

high temperature/high pressure reservoirs

low temperature reservoirs

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Main input to Flow Assurance study

The main parameters

Reservoir fluid properties

Pressure
Temperature.

Main focus areas dealt with

Hydrates
Thermal insulation

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Wax
Erosion
Flow induced vibrations
Water hammer.

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Field development Engineering phases

A field is developed in several phases.
Flow Assurance is an important part of each phase from
concept evaluation to tail end production.

Concept
Evaluations

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FEED

Detailed
Engineering

Operation

Tail end
production

Field development Feasibility /Concept evaluation

Screening of different alternative solutions

Possible showstoppers and opportunities for each option considered shall

be identified.
Flow Assurance contributes with system understanding, identification of
specific challenges related to fluid properties, multiphase handling and
driving pressure.
An outline of the production and process system for each option is
created.

The options deemed feasible are then ranked and one or two
options moved into the FEED phase

Safety
Cost
Technologic maturity
Operability.

Flow Assurance:

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Main focus on pressure and temperature drops and flow regimes in flow
lines. Heavy slugging should be avoided

Tools: 1D multiphase flow simulations software

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Field development Front End Engineering Design

(FEED)
In the FEED phase a concept is usually selected (or it might
be a ranking of concepts)
The challenges identified in the concept phase are
investigated in more detail. Further challenges are identified
and mitigating actions are identified.
The Flow Assurance engineer needs to supply strategies to
handle a multitude of issues such as erosive wear, flow
induced vibrations, hydrates, wax, thermal cold spots and
dead legs, pressure drop and temperature drop among many
things.
It shall be concluded on whether an issue can be solved in the
detailed engineering phase or not.
Tools used in aiding flow assurance:

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1D multiphase flow simulations softwares; FlowManager or OLGA

Sand erosion screening tools; DNV-RP-O501 or Tulsa
Flow induced vibration screening; Energy Institute guideline and/or
detailed structural analysis
Thermal design tools

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Field development Engineering Procurement

Construction (EPC)
In the EPC phase detailed analysis is carried out to
ensure that all Flow Assurance requirements are
implemented to the specification of the customer.
Operational monitoring systems and development of
process procedures are part of the flow assurance
responsibility.
Main type of tools used aiding flow assurance:

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1D multiphase flow simulations software

Sand erosion screening tools; DNV-RP-O501 or Tulsa and

CFD sand erosion simulations

Flow induced vibration screening; Detailed structural analysis

Thermal design tools: thermal finite element analysis (FEA)

and thermal CFD simulations
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Field development Operation

During operation of the field the flow assurance engineer
is involved in online monitoring of the system.
Provide advice on

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Flow assurance
Operating procedures
Surveillance
Production optimization

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Field development Tail end production / Increased

Oil (gas) recovery
Extend life of field
Tie in new developments
Add new equipment to increase oil and gas recovery
The process starts over from concept evaluation through
FEED, detailed enginerring and new operation

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Flow Assurance - challenges

The list of focus points are long. We will touch in on
some of the issues later and will list some of them:

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Pressure and temperature drops in subsea equipment and

flow lines
Multiphase flow (gas, oil and water)
Flow regime

Hydrates formation
Wax deposits
Corrosion
Chemical injection
Production of sand along with gas, oil and water from the
reservoir
Erosion and accumulation of sand in the production equipment

Thermal insulation design

Water hammer
Flow induced vibrations
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Fluid properties
When an oil and/or gas field is discovered several
exploration and appraisal wells are drilled to
characterize the reservoir. Samples of the reservoir fluid
are taken which are tested in labs and the composition
is determined and form the basis for determining the
fluid properties for the field.
Fluid compositions are entered into a PVT equation of
state software (PVTsim, HYSYS, MultiFlash)

PVT is an abbreviation for Pressure Volume and

Temperature

Tuned against fluid properties at reservoir conditions

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Fluid properties
Once the fluid properties are entered into a PVT equation of
state software the software can provide physical properties of
all the fluid phases:

Volume/mass fraction
Density, viscosity, thermal conductivity, specific heat,

The PVT data (out put data from equation of state software) is
the main input data to a multitude of activities and tools aiding
the field development process:

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Reservoir simulation tools

Pipeline multiphase simulations tools
Process simulation tools
Physical fluid properties needed for detailed FEA and CFD
simulations.
Hydrate management by providing hydrate equilibrium curves
and identifying required amount of hydrate inhibitor.
Wax management by providing wax appearance
temperatures

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