Abstract
The enormous cost of handling the challenges of flow assurance in subsea wells, flowlines, and risers, especially in deepwater applications, has necessitated a proactive approach to prevent their risk of occurrence. To ensure that transportation of the hydrocarbon is economical and efficient from the subsea wellhead to the processing units, a flow assurance heat management system is relevant in the design and planning of a fluid transport system. Consequently, the advancement of new technologies to serve the increasing need by exploring the technologically challenging and hostile subsea fields is of great importance. A comparative study on heat management systems in flowlines was conducted from the top five publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Sage) based on the number of publications to determine the level of work done by researchers in the last decade, the figures from the study showed the need for scientific research in the field of active heating. Additionally, a review was implemented to ascertain the likely advantages and drawbacks of each technique, its limitations concerning field applications and then recommend suitable cost-effective technique(s). The active heating system gives the most cost-effective solution for subsea deepwater fields.
Highlights
Petroleum industry investments are capital intensive and can only be justified by the optimal exploitation of oil and gas at a minimum cost
A comparison of the heat management systems from Figure 3b below shows that approximately 42% (52 articles) of the total work done by researchers was in active heating while 88% (110 articles) in passive insulation
Active heating or passive insulation system is needed to evade paraffin plug and hydrates formation inside the flowline
Summary
Petroleum industry investments are capital intensive and can only be justified by the optimal exploitation of oil and gas at a minimum cost. The industry is driven by technological innovations with enormous resources committed to discovering ways of mitigating production problems. Best practices regarding reservoir management, production surveillance, environmental management, and operations safety are evolving, all driven by the quest for competitive advantage and profit maximization [1]. Production problems present enormous challenges for field operators owing to the prohibitive cost of mitigation, opportunity loss cost for downtime, and startup problems. Scale treatment, depressurization for hydrate removal, foam, and emulsion treatment are disincentives to any production system. In subsea operations where process conditions are unfavorable, flow assurance challenges have become a global issue. There is a need for a proactive production surveillance system for monitoring and timely detection of production problems and for problem characterization [2,3]
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