Jim Bramlett, Commercial Manager – The Americas, Tracerco, explores how the technology, sustainability, and efficiency shaping the energy sector as a whole are reflected by changes in flow assurance.
Flow assurance is the lifeline of offshore and subsea oil and gas operations, ensuring the smooth and uninterrupted transportation of hydrocarbons from reservoirs to processing facilities. This seemingly simple task becomes more challenging in deepwater and ultra-deepwater environments, where high pressures, low temperatures, and long pipeline distances create fertile grounds for blockages caused by hydrates, asphaltenes, wax, and scale. Operators must redefine how they identify, address, and prevent flow assurance challenges in this high-stakes field.
Adapting to an evolving industry
The industry is changing, driven by ageing assets, technological advancements, evolving industry demands, environmental concerns and regulatory pressures. Embracing and preparing for this change is essential, and rapid receipt of accurate data is as crucial as ever, as maintaining flow is essential for operational success.
Advanced diagnostic and measurement solutions are required to ensure the efficient and uninterrupted flow of hydrocarbons in pipelines, wells, and processing systems.
A pipeline sitting 9000 ft below sea level has immense pressure, and not all tools can operate at those depths. Wells are changing – they are getting hotter and have increased pressure – and the way a company operates them has to change in accordance. It may be that more chemicals are needed to prevent an issue, but this can only be planned for if the necessary insights have been gathered.
As assets are ageing and the life of fields are decreasing, companies are using longer subsea tiebacks to maximise recovery from distant fields while reducing the need for new infrastructure. This lowers costs and extends the life of existing facilities, but it’s a longer run, and a flow assurance issue in a longer subsea tieback can disrupt hydrocarbon flow, leading to blockages such as hydrate or wax formation, increased downtime and costly remediation efforts. Put simply, operators can’t fix what they can’t find.
Diagnosing blockages: real-world applications
An operator we worked with in the North Sea had a suspected blockage in a 6 in. flexible riser to a semi-submersible production platform and needed to obtain information on the location. After evaluating a variety of pipeline inspection technologies, the North Sea operator decided to deploy Tracerco’s non-intrusive screening technology, ExplorerTM.
The technology works by scanning pipelines through any type of coating to obtain a mean density profile along the pipeline. The results confirmed a full-bore blockage of the Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM) scale in the loop leading up to the mid-water arch. This information allowed the operator to commence remediation activities with confidence. Typically, 50 - 80% of remediation attempts fail the first time, and further attempts double the associated cost. Therefore, an operator needs to determine the exact nature of a flow assurance issue before wasting resources. With our insights, operators can get it right the first time, increasing efficiency and reducing operational costs and production downtime caused by ineffective remediation.
The industry faces increasing pressure to reduce its carbon footprint and be sustainable. As a result, chemical usage for flow assurance is being optimised to minimise environmental impact. Companies can reduce the risk of environmental issues and ensure environmental compliance during pipeline commissioning and decommissioning projects by obtaining a full picture of the pipeline’s contents and condition at the earliest stages.
Flow assurance – the proactive approach
Historically, flow assurance relied heavily on modelling or reactive methods to address problems like hydrate formation, asphaltene, wax deposition or scaling after they occurred. A proactive approach is now essential, using advanced analytics to predict and mitigate issues before they impact operations. To support customers in visualising the condition of subsea pipelines, Tracerco developed the DiscoveryTM CT scanner to proactively see integrity flaws of piggable and unpiggable subsea pipelines in real-time. Baseline scanning is carried out right after operations begin, followed by periodic scans to identify any buildup before it becomes a bigger and more expensive issue for companies. This non-intrusive, field-proven diagnostic technology is designed to address challenges related to flow assurance, such as blockages, deposits and flow restrictions within pipelines and subsea flowlines, delivering real-time insights.
Success in the Gulf of Mexico
We were recently contacted by an operator in the Gulf of Mexico as a pipeline was blocked during start up after a planned platform turn around. After several unsuccessful attempts, the operator couldn’t remediate the line, suggesting that more information on the location, size and nature of the blockage was needed. We conducted an inspection campaign to locate and measure the size of the deposit and fully characterise the type of blockage in the line. Explorer was deployed first by the operator to measure the mean density of the pipeline contents. Once it had confirmed where the pipeline sections with the largest deposit were, Discovery was used to characterise the pipeline contents at each of the specified locations.
The operator’s feedback was that in just ten minutes of scanning, Discovery had shown the company more about the pipeline’s condition than all the modelling that had been carried out in the two years prior. It again proved the real benefits that could have been achieved if more detailed insights had been gathered before the start-up.
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