Bonga-Flow Assurance Benchmarking via Field Surveillance

The objective of this paper is to provide the results of key offshore oil and gas developments across the globe for common strategies and significant exceptions to those strategies. Most oil and gas companies have development processes consisting of the resource and terms attractive enough for development, what is the optimal path for development; detailed engineering and design; build and commission; operate and look back. Within this study, the projects examined reflect different producing basins, fluid type, and water and reservoir depths. Flow Assurance can be expressed as the coupling of multiphase flow and fluid phase behavior. There are only three questions to be answered for a pantheon of problems that can impede flow over the life of the development. The three questions are 1) will there be a flow assurance risk?; 2) how often will the issue require treatment?; and 3) can the risk be effectively managed by thermal, mechanical, and chemical means? The limitations of the strategies are becoming increasingly apparent as the requirements for system performance continue to become more demanding with changing and challenging offshore environment in the current dynamic market. Subsea technologies continue to be asked to facilitate recovering oil and gas while lowering cost while improving safety and operating efficiency to meet current industry challenges. Hence, there is a greater need to understand the flow assurance strategies to reduce overall field development costs and risk, and improve operability and reliability. Key flow assurance strategies adopted in various deepwater projects were considered for this study with an aim to summarize common strategies that arise and exceptions that could provide new strategies going forward.

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Daisy Chain and Manifold-Based Subsea Architectures for Brazilian Pre-Salt

Oazen

Macauley

Sertã

et al. 2021

Day 1 Mon, August 16, 2021

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Brazilian Pre-salts fields lie in approximately 2200 m w.d. in a challenging environment and are often characterized by highly corrosive produced fluids that pushed to the extreme the application of the most advanced material technology and engineering. Nevertheless, Lula, Sapinhoá, Mero and Búzios are definitively world-class prospects with production rates that may exceed 30.000 barrels per day per well. The development scheme of the Pre-salt fields followed the experience and the track record of the large number of deepwater fields that were previously developed in Brazil, in the post-salt regions, and is based on satellite wells tied to the floating production platform by means of dedicated production and service risers (i.e. each well has dedicated production and service lines). This satellite configuration offers the advantage to be simple, straightforward and resilient to field layout changes even during the project execution phase. However, the continuous pressure to which the Oil & Gas industry is exposed in order to increase profitability, reduce cost and, more recently, green house gas emission is encouraging Operators to evaluate different field architectures that are more traditionally implemented in other deepwater provinces outside Brazil and that the recent technology and construction asset developments made suitable also for a potential application in the Pre-salt fields. Moreover, those field architectures that are normally based on commingling of wells production are also prone to provide a faster production ramp-up and a reduced time to break even. This paper presents a description of possible Daisy Chain and Manifold-Based subsea architectures that are suitable to be applied to Brazilian pre-salt fields. The pros and cons of these alternative subsea layouts are explored. Additionally, cost and schedule analyses are presented to show the benefits of such architecture regarding CAPEX and ramp-up compared to satellite architecture, considering the "Brazilian pre-salt" scenario. Finally, a generic proposal for subsea architecture is presented for pre-salt developments jointly with practical solutions for typical operation demands related to flow assurance issues like, for instance, wax and hydrate management.

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Bonga-Flow Assurance Benchmarking via Field Surveillance

Cited by 3 publications

References 2 publications

Environmental and Corrosion Control Effects of Hydrogen Sulfide Scavengers in Oil and Gas Exploration

Environmental and Corrosion Control Effects of Hydrogen Sulfide Scavengers in Oil and Gas Exploration

Effective Strategies for Flow Assurance Process Design and Execution

Daisy Chain and Manifold-Based Subsea Architectures for Brazilian Pre-Salt

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