Abstract
In the Oil and Gas industry, installing pipe loops is a well-known hydraulic practice to increase oil pipeline capacities. Nevertheless, pipe loops could promote an unfavorable phenomenon known as fouling. That means that in a heavy oil-water mixture gathering system with low flow velocities, an oil-water stratified flow pattern will appear. In consequence, due to high viscosity, the oil stick on the pipe, causing a reduction of the effective diameter, reducing handled fluids production, and increasing energy consumption. As jet pumps increase total handled flow, increase the fluid velocities, and promote the homogenous mixture of oil and water, this type of pump could result attractive compared to other multiphase pump systems in reactivating heavy crude oil transport lines. Jet pumps are highly reliable, robust equipment with modest maintenance, ideal for many applications, mainly in the oil and gas industry. Nevertheless, their design method and performance analysis are rarely known in the literature and keep a high experimental component similar to most pumping equipment. This paper proposes a numerical study and the optimization of a booster multiphase jet pump system installed in a heavy oil conventional loop of a gathering system. First, the optimization of a traditionally designed jet pump, combining CFD simulation and optimization algorithms using commercials software (ANSYS CFX® and PIPEIT® tool), has been carried out. This method allowed evaluating the effect of multiple geometrical and operational variables that influence the global performance of the pump to run more than 400 geometries automatically in a reduced time frame. The optimized pump offers a substantial improvement over the original concerning total flow capacity (+17%), energy, and flow distribution. Then, the effect of the three jet pump plugin configurations in a heavy oil conventional trunkline loop was analyzed. Simulations were carried out for different driving fluid pressures and compared against a traditional pipeline loop’s performance. Optimum plugin connection increases fluid production by 30%. Finally, a new eccentric jet pump geometry has been proposed to improve exit velocities and pressure fields. This eccentric jet pump with the best connection was analyzed over the same conditions as the concentric optimized one. An improvement of 2% on handled fluid was achieved consistently with the observed uniform velocity field at the exit of the pump. A better total fluid distribution between the main and the loop line is obtained, handling around half of the complete fluid each.
Highlights
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Mature heavy oil fields are frequently characterized by a total fluid production with high water cut
As sequence of previous works [2,3], this paper proposes using a jet pump as a multiphase booster pump for mature heavy oil fields
For anpump oil production looped gathering system, a custom-designed ejector can operas a booster assisted by a smaller single-phase pump providing a high-pressure ate as a booster pump assisted by a smaller single-phase pump providing a high-pressure motive fluid
Summary
Mature heavy oil fields are frequently characterized by a total fluid production with high water cut (under 90%). Excessive water production causes incremental costs, energy consumption, and inefficient oil recovery from mature oil fields. Long distances in trunk lines generate significant hydraulic imbalances, creating restrictions to the flow of fluids to the processing center. Due to high rates of surface water, one of the associated problems is that, frequently, pipelines maximum capacity is reached at the early. Computation 2022, 10, x FOR PEER REVIEW
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