Effective Strategies for Flow Assurance Process Design and Execution

The objective of this paper is to provide the results of key offshore oil and gas developments across the globe for common strategies and significant exceptions to those strategies. Most oil and gas companies have development processes consisting of the resource and terms attractive enough for development, what is the optimal path for development; detailed engineering and design; build and commission; operate and look back. Within this study, the projects examined reflect different producing basins, fluid type, and water and reservoir depths. Flow Assurance can be expressed as the coupling of multiphase flow and fluid phase behavior. There are only three questions to be answered for a pantheon of problems that can impede flow over the life of the development. The three questions are 1) will there be a flow assurance risk?; 2) how often will the issue require treatment?; and 3) can the risk be effectively managed by thermal, mechanical, and chemical means? The limitations of the strategies are becoming increasingly apparent as the requirements for system performance continue to become more demanding with changing and challenging offshore environment in the current dynamic market. Subsea technologies continue to be asked to facilitate recovering oil and gas while lowering cost while improving safety and operating efficiency to meet current industry challenges. Hence, there is a greater need to understand the flow assurance strategies to reduce overall field development costs and risk, and improve operability and reliability. Key flow assurance strategies adopted in various deepwater projects were considered for this study with an aim to summarize common strategies that arise and exceptions that could provide new strategies going forward.