| Popis: |
Under the current market environment, deep water projects are required to evolve a more robust cost solution to remain competitive within the industry portfolio, ensuring safety as priority. With such market drivers in place, this paper details the engineering behind the development of a single flowline concept that ties-in to an existing production system for a GoM deep water development and the associated challenging flow assurance aspects of that design. The development is a fast track project (approximately 1.5 year from concept to first-oil) that leverages existing subsea infrastructure. The flowline length is over 10,000 ft at water depths exceeding 5,000 ft and will tie-in to a current flow loop dead leg of more than 7 miles in length. Success of the project will set a trend and allow development for future projects, i.e. infrastructure led solutions utilizing single flowlines with rapid delivery and increased financial returns. To meet economics and schedule, the tie-in is a flexible flowline, which implies limitation in the amount of insulation that can be added to the system; in addition the reservoir temperature is relatively low. These challenges constrain the operating envelop, limited by thermal performance. Traditional hydrate strategies such as dead oil displacement are not possible for a single leg spur line and continuous hydrate inhibition is not feasible from an OPEX aspect. Therefore a novel hydrate management strategy leveraging existing infrastructure is deployed. The development behind the hydrate and other flow assurance strategies is presented in this paper, as well as the realization of those strategies through to operation. |
