Search

Browse

• Communities
• Authors
• Year
• Titles
• Subjects

My Space

• Login

Basic design and simulation of oil production pipelines

Siaw Clement-Gyasi

Full record

---

Summary

After the successful drilling and completion of wells, the formation fluids are produced to the surface at the wellhead. The produced fluids are then transported at a distance of several miles from the wellhead to the production facility, where they go through separation (into water, oil and gas), conditioning, treatment, processing, measurement, refining or storage. The transportation usually takes place through production pipelines that sit on the land or on the seafloor. The design of the pipelines is crucial both for maximizing the oil/gas throughput, as well as for minimizing the shut in and start up times. The design involves testing and simulation of several possible oil/gas exploitation scenarios, in order to deliver the produced fluids to the separation facility at the recommended pressure and temperature conditions. Several factors should be included in the study, such as fluid pressure, temperature and velocity, phase distribution at each section of the pipeline, heat transfer rate to the environment, erosion-corrosion restrictions and the possible formation of flow restrictions like solid precipitation, deposition, gel effect from the formation of waxes etc. The thesis is a thorough research of two offshore oil reservoirs with three production wells each that gather into two production manifolds and they are routed through a 12 km long pipeline to the separation facility. Two possible sets of pipeline sizes are tested through simulation, which includes the reservoir performance, the performance of each well and the performance of each set of pipelines. The IPM simulation suite (MBAL, PROSPER and GAP) was used for conducting the necessary simulations. The results include a set of possible solutions for maintaining maximum production for a period of ten years.

Available Files

Services