Surfaces equipment

One of the main surface equipment items typically required for gas fields is compression, which is installed to allow a low reservoir pressure to be attained. Gas compression takes up a large space and is expensive. If gas compression is not initially required on a platform, then its installation is usually delayed until it becomes necessary. This reduces the initial capital investment and capital exposure. Figure 8.12 indicates when gas compression is typically installed ... 

Figure 9.18 provides an overview of the application envelope and the respective advantages and disadvantages of the various artificial lift techniques. As can be seen, only a few methods are suited for high rate environments gas lift, ESP s, and hydraulic systems. Beam pumps are generally unsuited to offshore applications because of the bulk of the required surface equipment. Whereas the vast majority of the world s artificially lifted strings are beam pumped, the majority of these are stripper wells producing less than 10 bpd. 

Surface Equipment 1101. When and How to Close the Well 1101. Gas-Cut Mud 1103. The Closed Well 1105. Kick Control Procedures 1106. Maximum Casing/Borehole Pressure 1111. 

Rotary equipment refers to the pieces of surface equipment in drilling operations that actually rotate or impart rotating motion to the drill pipe. This equipment includes the upper members of the drill string such as the swivel, swivel sub kelly cock, kelly, lower kelly valve, and kelly sub (Figure 4-87), as well as the kelly bushing and rotatary table [13]. 

Figure 4-186 shows the layout of surface equipment for a typical air drilling operation. Described below are specialized surface components unique to air drilling operations. 

Rotating Kelly Packer (Rotating Head). Figure 4-187 shows the details of a rotating head. This surface equipment is critical and is also a unique piece of... 

When using oil-base mud, care must be taken to prevent water becoming free. Water is always present in oil-base mud whether added intentionally through the surface equipment or from the drilled formations. API RP 7G recommends the following factors to be monitored when oil-base muds are in use [181] ... 

Figure 20.2 shows the surface equipment used in a typical subsurface waste-disposal system. Detailed discussion of surface treatment methods can be found in Warner and Lehr.6 The individual elements are listed in the following ... 

Corrosion inhibitors are used to reduce the corrosion of surface equipment, surface casing, and the drill string by drilling and well treatment fluids. Many different corrosion inhibitors have been used. These include amine salts such as ammonium sulfite -bisulfite blends, zinc carbonate, zinc chromate, hydrated lime, fatty amine salts of alkylphosphates, cationic polar amines, ethoxylated amines, and tertiary cyclic amines. Commercial products are usually proprietary blends of chemicals. 

Monitoring the well for leaks and nearby aquifers for contamination must also be considered. The extent of monitoring will vary based on the applicable environmental regulations and nearby potable aquifers. Monitoring wells can be constructed to monitor shallow or deep aquifers, and the cost of a these wells is determined by the required depth and the geology of the site. Additional costs include ancillary surface equipment and alarm systems (Mickley 2006). 

Plutonium is the most important transuranium element. Its two isotopes Pu-238 and Pu-239 have the widest applications among all plutonium isotopes. Plutonium-239 is the fuel for nuclear weapons. The detonation power of 1 kg of plutonium-239 is about 20,000 tons of chemical explosive. The critical mass for its fission is only a few pounds for a solid block depending on the shape of the mass and its proximity to neutron absorbing or reflecting substances. This critical mass is much lower for plutonium in aqueous solution. Also, it is used in nuclear power reactors to generate electricity. The energy output of 1 kg of plutonium is about 22 million kilowatt hours. Plutonium-238 has been used to generate power to run seismic and other lunar surface equipment. It also is used in radionuclide batteries for pacemakers and in various thermoelectric devices. 

CDS of surfaces/equipment coming into direct contact with the product requires special consideration. While CDS procedures of guaranteed efficiency must be applied, it is imperative that no trace of the CDS agents subsequently remain on such surfaces, as this would result in automatic product contamination. The final stage of most CDS procedures, as applied to such process equipment, involves exhaustive rinsing with highly pure water (water for injections WFI). This is followed if at all possible by autoclaving. 

In one continuous method (17), the waxy oil charge—for example, in the case of a topped crude—is diluted with an equal volume of propane and the mixture is chilled to about —25° F. by means of heat exchange with cold filtrate in double-pipe scraped-surface equipment. This chilled mixture is then mixed with propane which has been chilled by autorefrigeration to —45° F. to bring the ratio of propane to oil to about 5 to 1. Ninety per cent of the refrigeration required is accomplished in this manner the remaining 10% is obtained by evaporating propane from the diluted mixture. 

The petroleum engineer should determine the type of fluid very early in the life of his reservoir. Fluid type is the deciding factor in many of the decisions which must be made regarding the reservoir. The method of fluid sampling, the types and sizes of surface equipment, the calcula-tional procedures for determining oil and gas in place, the techniques of predicting oil and gas reserves, the plan of depletion, and the selection of enhanced recovery method are all dependent on the type of reservoir fluid. 

Consider a black oil at a reservoir pressure above the bubble point. Production into the wellbore will consist solely of liquid. During the trip to the surface and through surface equipment to the stock tank, the dissolved gas will come out of solution. This gas will appear as separator gas and stock-tank vent gas. Typical surface facilities for a black oil are shown in Figure 13-1. 

A common example of flash vaporization is the separation of gas and liquid in surface equipment in an oil or gas field.1 The fluid from the wellhead is brought to equilibrium in a separator at separator temperature and pressure. This fluid is called separator feed. 

When appropriate, microbial monitoring of clean rooms and some other controlled environments should include quantitation of the microbial content of room air, compressor air that entered the critical area, surfaces, equipment, sanitization containers, floors, walls, and personnel garments (e.g., gowns and gloves). 

The surface equipment, pipe, and tubing are of carbon steel. The wall shear stress of the liquid due to the high gas velocity is 90 N/m2. (a) What type of corrosion is encountered (b) What type of protection can be adopted economically (c) If a corrosion inhibitor is adopted, what type of selection tests should be used to choose the right chemical (Pou)... 

Technical and product information is also available from the three main suppliers of scraped-surface equipment in Europe, namely Gerstenberg and Agger (Denmark), Schroder (Germany) and Johnson (UK) who fabricate Perfector, Kombinator and Votator equipment, respectively. Numerous patents on fat spreads have also been published, but their review is outside the scope of this chapter. 

Although strictly not an acid-gas disposal method, miscible flooding using carbon dioxide is, in some situations, an economic method of enhanced oil recovery. It shares many characteristics with its disposal cousin, particularly the surface equipment. 

Another important aspect in the design of an acid gas injection scheme is the solubility of the acid gas in water and brine. In the design of the surface equipment it is useful to know the amount of acid dissolved in the water removed in the interstage scrubbers. From a reservoir engineering point of view, it is important to know the solubility of the acid gas in the formation water. The water removed in the interstage scrubbers does not contain any dissolved solids because it is water of condensation. 

---