November 2022 Symposium Summary
We are pleased to welcome you to the November 2022 UWA Flow Assurance Symposium. This event is designed to provide you with an opportunity to examine the ongoing flow assurance research within the Centre for Long Subsea Tiebacks at The University of Western Australia. The feedback you provide on these presentations is critical to focussing our research efforts to advance both student outcomes and industrial capability. This meeting builds upon the research themes developed in our various Symposia and Workshops over the past nine years, and is organised around two themes of key importance to current and future energy production:
Theme #1: Understanding, Detecting and Avoiding Hydrate Blockages. Our first session will focus on our ongoing efforts to understand the circumstances of hydrate blockages to support efforts at operating in a management, rather than avoidance regime. Our first speaker will examine a new capability for performing transient hydrate formation predictions for high water cut systems, where such systems are expected to be of relevance for both natural hydrate production systems and for subsea separation applications. This work builds on previous experience with the OLGA Extensibility Framework, and is backed by an extensive set of experimental measurements. To accurately predict when hydrate formation may occur in a pipeline, phase boundary calculations are critical: this is the topic that our second speaker will address. Previously, we have presented a hydrate formation database and preliminary results for the ThermoFAST 2 tool in predicting hydrate equilibria. This talk will provide an update on that work, demonstrating the underlying mechanics of these tools and providing a demonstration of ThermoFAST 2’s application to complex petroleum fluids. Our third presentation will seek to unpack the synergistic effects of film forming corrosion inhibitors to manage both corrosion and hydrate formation. Previously, we have seen a substantial synergistic effect preventing hydrate deposition in samples of regenerated MEG containing FFCIs: this new work aims to explore the mechanisms at play and characterise FFCI performance relative to current anti agglomerants. In aiming to prevent hydrate blockage, as opposed to formation, early warning detection and diagnostic systems are critical. The final presentation of the first session will examine the use of an in-line non-invasive hydrate deposition detector instrumented on our single pass flowloop – the Joule Thomson Hydrate Apparatus.
Theme #2: Advanced Tools for Flow Assurance Solutions. Our second session will explore ongoing efforts to translate our experimental and theoretical work into flow assurance solutions for field applications. Our first speaker will continue on the path of translating our data on hydrate nucleation to a formation likelihood tool that may be co-deployed with pipeline simulation tools. This work builds on established engineering practices for assessing risk to provide a pathway for understanding, probabilistically, where hydrate may form. Our second speaker builds on this work, exploring the remaining knowledge gaps that must be filled around size-scaling equivalence between the benchtop and field. Finally, we turn to a guest presentation that examines some of the new technologies becoming available for subsea separation systems. The pseudo dry gas concept shows significant potential to achieve a suite of advancements in enhancing the productive lifetime of offshore assets, reducing the severity of various flow assurance hazards, and managing the CO2 footprint of production systems.
Your feedback on the results presented here will inform our research activities over the coming year and new results will be presented at our next Flow Assurance Symposium, which has been scheduled for November 2023. Please feel free to contact us should you have any questions or feedback after the meeting.
Dr Bruce Norris, Research Fellow, Centre for Long Subsea Tiebacks: bruce.norris@uwa.edu.au
Prof. Zachary Aman, Chevron-Woodside Chair in Long Subsea Tiebacks: zachary.aman@uwa.edu.au
