Energy & Fuels, Vol.34, No.8, 9371-9378, 2020
Flow Risk Index: A New Metric for Solid Precipitation Assessment in Flow Assurance Management Applied to Gas Hydrate Transportability
Flow assurance is a central component of oil and gas production, concerning all methods applied to ensure stable, safe, and economical transport of hydrocarbons during all stages of production. As production conditions become more critical, flow assurance issues involving solid precipitation (hydrates, wax, asphaltenes, and scale) are increasingly important, requiring data and knowledge that can be used to develop risk management strategies and guidelines to minimize their impact on production. Much of the knowledge for solid precipitation comes from experimental measurements using a myriad of experimental apparatuses. The large amount of experimental studies performed using different experimental apparatuses can produce conflicting results. Development of an analysis method able to easily compare different experimental conditions would represent great improvement, and that is the proposition of this paper. For this study, rock-flow cell experiments of gas hydrate formation in the presence of anti-agglomerants were analyzed using a new analysis method. The outcome of this method introduces the flow risk index, which is obtained from the scores given to three different categories (aggregation, wall deposition, and bedding) related to conditions leading to flowline plugging. The value obtained for the flow risk index determines the risk of observing flow disruption at a given set of conditions.