TITLE:
Flow Assurance in Subsea Pipeline Design for Transportation of Petroleum Products
AUTHORS:
Son Tung Pham, Minh Huy Truong, Ba Tuan Pham
KEYWORDS:
Flow Assurance, Pipeline Design, Thermal Insulation, Wax Deposition, Heat Transfer in Pipeline
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Civil Engineering,
Vol.7 No.2,
June
26,
2017
ABSTRACT: Transportation of petroleum products through pipeline presents considerable risks including wax formation and deposition as a result of heat loss of fluids, which is harmful to the flow due to the reduced inner diameter or totally blocked pipelines in extreme cases. The production interruption due to blocked pipelines can cause colossal financial loss. Therefore, in order to diminish those adverse effects, it is critical that pipeline design for flow assurance should be considered. Flow assurance is a relatively new field in oil and gas industry, it means that the flow of hydrocarbon stream from one point to another must be ensured successfully and economically. Although flow assurance is extremely diverse, encompassing many discrete and specialized subjects and bridging across the full gamut of engineering disciplines, our work concentrated principally on the study of wax deposit in the pipelines. The main purpose of this paper is to focus on the aspect of material in pipeline design and the selection of thermal insulation coatings. Furthermore, operating parameters such as pressure, temperature and flowrate will be examined to achieve optimum results. For the case study in this paper, the pipeline connecting Ca NguVang Oilfield’s Wellhead Platform (WHP) to the Central Processing Platform of Bach Ho Oilfield (CPP-3) in Vietnam will be studied. Hence, this work covers several aspects, namely the theoretical study, the modeling using Excel as well as using specialized software OLGA, and finally the application for a real case in the petroleum industry in Vietnam.