Introduction Flow assurance of hydrocarbon streams in subsea systems, such as pipelines, is a very important subject in the oil and gas industry. It is diverse and encompasses many branches of engineering disciplines. Flow assurance involves handling many solids deposits from hydrocarbon fluid streams that can form in subsea flow lines. Some of the flow assurance risks in subsea pipelines include gas hydrates, slugging, corrosion, reservoir souring, wax, scales etc. Among these flow assurance risks, hydrate formation is of major concern in the oil and gas industry. Hydrates are solid-crystalline compounds formed when water come into contact with light hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane and propane under thermodynamically, usually high pressure and low temperature. Hence, hydrate readily form in flow lines transporting hydrocarbon streams along with produced water often lead to pressure drop in flow lines and eventually plug flow. Nowadays, offshore oil and gas projects have been moving further into the deeper sea where hydrates are significant problems due to favourable high pressure and low temperature conditions. As a result, deep water flow assurance has become an increasingly major concern for oil and gas industry. The potential formation of hydrates in gas production is of great importance in connection with pipeline transportation of hydrocarbon liquids and with the production of fluids from natural gas or gas condensate reservoirs. Hydrate formation during oil and gas production can plug production facilities and cause a long-term problem to oil and gas project. According to Dholabhal et al. (1993), the accumulation of hydrates is common in the horizontal sections and around fittings could lead to disastrous pipeline blo... ... middle of paper ... ...nd Control of Natural Gas Hydrates”. European Offshore Petroleum Conference and Exhibition, London, Society of Petroleum Engineers, Paper 8137, October 24-27 1978. 31. Yousif M.H. “The Kinetics of Hydrate Formation”. Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, New Orleans, LA, USA, Society of Petroleum Engineers, Paper 28479, September 25-28 1994. 32. Jassim E., Abdi M.A., and Muzychka Y. A CFD-Based Model to Locate Flow Restriction Induced Hydrate Deposition in Pipelines. Offshore Technology Conference, OTC 19190. 2008 33. Lysne D. “An Experimental Study of Hydrate Plug Dissociation by Pressure Reduction” Ph.D. Thesis, Norwegian Institute of Technology, University of Trondhiem, 1995. 34. Viana F., Garcia-Hernadez A., and Supak K. “Hydrate Formation and Slugging Assessment of an Offshore Gas Field”. Pipe Simulation Interest Group annual meeting, (PSIG 1327). 2013
Stansbury, John. “Analysis of Frequency, Magnitude and Consequence of Worst-Case Spills From the Proposed Keystone XL Pipeline”. University of Nebraska-Lincoln Water Center. Web. 10 December 2015.
Also what safety nets do we have in place in case of environmental catastrophe. The only real way to look at how safe it is is to examine the Trans Mountain pipelines history. The pipeline has been in use for 51 years and in that 51 years there has been 78 spills, (Trans Mountain.com 2013) most of these
The explicit presentation of the mathematics involved in the Arrhenius equation (Michels, Tsong, and Smith 1983) rendered the parameters involved in glass hydration understandable. However, the actual implementation of the physical processes described in the mathematical equations into a model replicating the natural environment is a complicated problem hard to solve (Stevenson 1998).
Gas in shale formations are“low in permeability,” making it very tedious to extract, but with the increase in technological knowledge in fracking and horizontally drilling into shale beds, the vast reserves of natural gas resource could be extracted (4). Fracking is a large industrial operation that boost the “productivity of a oil or gas well” (5). It is a process by which, under very high pressure, a mixture of water, chemicals, and sand, are pumped into shale formations that causes fractures in the rocks to open wider or create new fractures that would allow otherwise trapped oil and gas to flow into the wells (6).
Ever since the process of hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—made its entrance to the oil industry, issues and problems surrounding the process have become a common occurrence. Fracking is the controversial process of horizontal drilling (see fig. 1), where millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals are pumped deep into an oil well to extract natural gas from the earth’s crust (Ehrenberg 20). This practice has even been banned in some places (see fig. 1). The methane that comes out of the earth and the water used—called fracking fluid—has the potential to cause problems with local ground water supplies. Whether or not fracking is the cause of these problems, concern should be observed during the fracking process to reduce the chances of water contamination among residential areas.
Trenching to reasonable depth where the pipeline and surrounding soil can sustain the imposed loads and stresses is typically considered the most effective solution. Pipelines should be buried a depth which is greater than maximum gouge depth expected over the pipelines design life to protect the pipeline from the ice gouging or scouring threat. Recent research studies have reveal...
This is related to the blending of the fluids and rocks of the reservoir. Skeletal properties of interest to reservoir engineers include porosity, pore size distribution, compressibility, and absolute permeability of the rod. Interaction or dynamic properties of reservoir rocks are affected by the nature and by its interaction with present fluids, as...
L. Roberts patented a revolutionary technology lay the ground work from modern fracking. Col. Roberts used filled iron torpedo shells with black powder, and later nitroglycerin. The torpedo’s borehole was filled with water. By using this new concoction of material, Col Roberts was about the effectively control the depth and trajectory of the explosion. The concept of the nitroglycerin filled “exploding torpedo” was used well into the 1990’s for water and oil wells. However, almost a half a century before nitroglycerin became obsolete in the fracking community, engineers in an oil field in Hugoton, Kansas, ran the first successful fracking oil rig using an alternative process utilizing water, sand, and chemicals. Two years later, that process was optimized and used in the first commercial application of hydraulic fracking on record. The innovative process used in the Hugoton, Oklahoma, and Duncan, Kansas, is the foundation for the modern hydraulic fracturing
A reservoir is considered as a compaction drive is when the pore volume contraction takes prominently to overall expansion while the reservoir is saturated. This drive is supplemented by solution gas drive and may or may not by water/gas cap drive. This reservoir acts like their non-compaction counterparts except that they exhibit enhanced recoveries. For example, the oil recovery will be greater for a solution gas drive by which the compaction drive will act like a normal solution gas drive reservoir. This is because of the direct consequence of the extra rock expansion that compaction drive reservoirs actually have. Due to the extra compaction, some production occurs. For instance, the permeability may decline, fracture may happen and subsidence but all there problems are manageable and the result of compaction is very favorable.
This paper describes equipment and techniques for responding to oil spills. Various techniques for the containment, cleanup and recovery of oil spills are examined; advantages and disadvantages of each are considered. Along with providing insight for oil spill response, this paper discusses environmental factors which can contribute to the success or failure of a cleanup operation.
On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, located in the Gulf of Mexico exploded killing 11 workers and injuring 17. The oil rig sank a day-and-a-half later. The spill was referred to as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP oil spill, Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and BP oil disaster. It was first said that little oil had actually leaked into the ocean but a little over a month later the estimate was 12,000-19,000 barrels of crude oil being leaked per day. Many attempts were made to stop the leak but all failed until they capped the leak on July 15, 2010, and on September 19 the federal government declared the well “effectively dead.” In the three months that it took to finally put a stop the leak, 4.9 million barrels of oil were released into the ocean. The spill caused considerable damage to marine and wildlife habitats and the Gulf’s fishing and tourism industries. The White House energy advisor, Carol Browner, goes as far to say that the Deepwater oil spill is the “worst environmental disaster the US has faced.”
ADCOP – Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline Project." IPIC. N.p., 2014. Web. 13 May 2014.
Modifications to the well-known van der Waals-Platteeuw (VDW-P) model (van der Waals and Platteeuw, 1959) led to several thermodynamic models for predicting hydrate formation and/or dissociation conditions. The VDW-P model was derived which was based on the similarity between the hydrate formation and Langmuir adsorption. However, both the mechanisms are different, even if the adsorption mechanism is able to explain the nonstoichiometric feature of hydrates.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, pipelines became far more versatile than before. More pipelines were being used to transport natural gas, such as carbon dioxide for oil recovery and other natural gas liquids for a growing heating industry. Pipelines were being constructed to gather oil and gases more than a mile beneath the bottom of the
Pipeline transport is the use of pipes to convey various products from one point to another. These pipes can be made up of metal, plastic or even ceramic. It is efficient in transporting petroleum and natural gases over long distances. It is also convenient and economical in transporting petroleum and natural gases when compared to truck and rail modes of transport. It allows for the transport of large volumes of the commodity (Clifford