Value of Flow Assurance Collaborative Teamwork

Abstract Flow assurance is an integrated set of activities designed to ensure and optimize the continuous and efficient flow of oil and gas from the reservoir, through the wells and production facilities, and up to the point of sale ("from rock to stock"). Flow assurance activities are employed throughout field life, from exploration and early development planning, to commissioning, startup, operations and abandonment. This paper presents the flow assurance integrated approach in a collaborative environment to understand and mitigate the underlying causes of severe slugging in an onshore production asset. From a business perspective, severe slugging impairs production system's availability and ability to sustain production. The paper also summarizes the outcomes two years after implementation. A multidisciplinary team, consisting of Operations, Development and Engineering specialists, used advanced integrated modeling and data analysis techniques to address the challenge of severe slugging in an onshore production system. Team's collaborative efforts led to improved production efficiency, profitability, and safety by enhancing the control system at the plant inlet. At the time of project evaluation: The project evaluation showed the system's actual performance matched predictions (ref. 2), leading to increased availability close to 100% and a persistent 20% increase in sustainable oil rate. This resulted in an 18.5% acceleration of cumulative production and oil revenue compared to the base business case. N.B. For confidentiality reasons, the results are shown as percentage deviations from the mean. At the time of writing this paper: Figure 1 below shows a "before / after" comparison of the oil rates at the time of writing this paper. Novelty and further work: System modeling includes the main control loops and their impact on the dynamic flow behavior, which is an innovative approach in integrated subsurface / surface modeling. This work laid the foundation for further vertical integration of subsurface and surface models (i.e. dynamic models with significantly different time steps). Advanced / autonomous well control and optimization is potentially enabled by this additional integration, where subsurface uncertainties are accounted for.