Erosion, corrosion and erosion-corrosion problems provide significant safety and environmental risks to the oil and gas industry due to unexpected material failure. In addition the cost associated with such failures is estimated to be many millions of dollars each year due to deferred or lost production and repair costs. Severe damage has occurred to tubing, flowlines, pipe fittings, headers, valves, pumps, and other production equipment. In some cases projects choose expensive corrosion resistant alloys (CRA’s) to mitigate against erosion-corrosion. For the gas fields discussed in this paper an erosion management strategy is in place but two major problems remain:

  1. Multiple flowlines (up to three) have been used on each high production rate well (up to 250 mmscf/d). This creates space issues that have resulted in the need for unusual piping routes and platform extensions. In addition all equipment and control systems are multiplied accordingly.

  2. Rates are restricted to values based on the API 14E equation. Currently field production is ~1.5 bscf/d of gas. A 1% increase in velocity could result in an increase of 15 mmscf/d.

Consequently this semi-quantitative project was sanctioned to evaluate a range of monitoring equipment to determine if it might be possible to safely increase production rates.

Subject
Sand detectors, Sensors, Sand, Probes, Walls, Solids, Installation, Corrosion detection, Metal loss, Instrumentation, Flowlines, Erosion, Electrical resistance probes
© 2004 Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of AMPP. Positions and opinions advanced in this work are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of AMPP. Responsibility for the content of the work lies solely with the author(s).
2004
Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP)
You do not currently have access to this content.