FEESA to Present at DEVEX

Our Consultancy Director, Dr Martin Watson will present at this years DEVEX conference on 12th and 13th May at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre (http://www.devex-conference.org/).  The subject of his talk will be “Facilities Engineering Constraints on Subsurface Decision Making” and he’ll be giving presenting work based on studies of real developments and showing how a range of facilities constraints (such as corrosion, hydrates and wax) had an influence on the production profile and the development concept.  Click here to read the abstract.

“Facilities Engineering Constraints on Subsurface Decision Making”

As the cost of production facilities becomes an ever larger proportion of overall development costs, better design methods are being developed in order to ensure the optimum field development solution is found.  Integrated Production Modelling (IPM), where the reservoir, wells and surface facilities are modelled simultaneously, minimises the number of artificial boundary conditions imposed by traditional design methods and can be used to de-bottleneck the system and investigate the financial benefits of a range of development solutions.  To what level of detail each component in an IPM needs to be represented requires engineering judgment.  IPM can be done with relatively simplistic representation of the network, such as empirical look-up table or spreadsheet based models.  However the more physically realistic the models are for the facilities, the more technical issues can be resolved during design; such as integrity management and flow assurance.  As some of these issues can have major implications on the availability and cost of production system they can have a significant implication on the techno-economic feasibility of a development.  Hence the sooner these issues are resolved in design, the better the chosen field development can be.

Using a series of case studies based on real developments, it will be shown how Integrated Production Modelling with detailed physical models has allowed developers to investigate producing their assets through existing systems with limiting corrosion constraints, within the thermal constraints of conventional facilities technologies and investigate the potential of new technologies, such as cold hydrate slurry flow.