Oil Pools Research Articles

Numerical Simulation of Converter Station Fire: A Study focus on the Fire Hazard of Valve Tower

The fire hazard of a valve tower in converter station fires were investigated by using the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). The 2 m2, 5 m2 and 10 m2 transformer oil pool fires with the calculated heat release rate (HRR) of 2.02, 6.23 and 13.78 MW were considered in the simulations, and the smoke propagation process, smoke temperature and visibility were mainly concerned. The results showed that the whole valve tower was immersed in the fire smoke at about 600 s in 2 m2 fire condition, and the maximum temperature rise inside the valve hall was about 20ºC. In the 5 m2 fire condition, the smoke layer height descended to the bottom of the valve tower at about 300 s, and the visibility around the valve modules was lower than 5 m at about 450 s. The maximum smoke temperature inside the valve hall was over 60ºC, and the temperature of smoke around the valve modules ranged from 43 to 52ºC. In the 10 m2 fire condition, the valve tower was immersed in the fire smoke at about 210 s, and the visibility around the valve modules was lower than 5 m at about 300 s. The smoke temperature beneath the ceiling of the valve hall was over 100ºC, and the temperature at the height of valve towers ranged from 65 to 80ºC. It was observed that the larger the fire size was, the higher the fire hazard of the valve tower would be found. In the 5 m2 and 10 m2 pool fire conditions, the thermal damage to the valve tower was non-negligible. The normal operation of the electrical components in the valve tower might be affected, and the failure of electrical components might be occurred.

Ogilvie Platform Composite Tectono-Sedimentary Element

Abstract The Ogilvie Platform Composite Tectono-Sedimentary Element (CTSE) occupies an area of about 68 000 km 2 in the northern part of the Yukon Territory of Canada, and includes all Paleozoic- and Triassic-aged strata between a base of Cambrian unconformity and a base of Jurassic and Cretaceous unconformity. This cratonic platform is composed of two lithologically distinct sedimentary successions: a lower suite of peritidal to shallow-subtidal, carbonate-dominated, Cambrian–Middle Devonian-aged units; and an upper succession of siliciclastic-dominated alluvial fan, shelf delta, nearshore, slope and basinal strata of Middle Devonian–Late Permian and Triassic age. The lower succession is composed of a synrift tectono-sedimentary element (TSE) and an overlying passive continental-margin TSE. The upper succession is composed of an Ellesmerian orogenic foreland TSE and a syn-epeirogenic TSE. The total discovered oil reserve within the Ogilvie Platform is estimated to be 1.757 × 10 6 m 3 (11.05 MMbbl) and the total discovered gas reserve is estimated to be 2.376 × 109 m 3 (83.7 Bcf) in four oil and gas pools. A variety of stratigraphic and structural trap types have been assessed to contain additional conventional hydrocarbon reserves, with a total mean potential of 33.4 × 10 6 m 3 (210.1 MMbbl) of oil and 33.4 × 10 9 m 3 (2.63 Tcf) of gas. The organic-rich shale and siltstone-dominated petroleum source-rock units, such as within the Road River Group, the Canol and Ford Lake formations, and organic-rich strata within the Hart River and Blackie formations, are also prospective for large reserves of unconventional oil and gas, and have yet to be formally assessed.

The study of burning behaviors and quantitative risk assessment for 0# diesel oil pool fires

The liquid fuel safety issues on fuel storage, transportation and processing have gained most attention because of the high fire risk. In this paper, some 0# diesel pool fire experiments with different diameters (0.2–1 m) were conducted with initial fuel thicknesses of 2 cm and 4 cm, respectively, to obtain liquid fuel combustion characteristics. Some key parameters including mass burning rate, flame height and the flame radiative heat flux, associated with fire risk, were investigated and determined. Subsequently, a detail quantitative risk assessment framework for 0# diesel pool fire is proposed based on the 0# diesel burning characteristics. In the framework, the probability of personal dead and the facility failure are calculated by the vulnerability models, respectively. In the end, 10 special tank fire scenarios were selected to show the whole risk calculation process. The tank diameter and the distance to pool fires were paid more attention in the cases. The safety distances in the cases are provided for the persons and nearby facilities, respectively. The paper enriches the basic experimental data and the provided framework is useful to the management of 0# diesel tank areas.

Differences in source kitchens for lacustrine in-source and out-of-source hydrocarbon accumulations

Because of the differences of hydrocarbon accumulation between in-source and out-of-source oil pools, the demand for source kitchen is different. Based on the establishment of source-to-reservoir correlation in the known conventional accumulations, and the characteristics of shale oil source kitchens as well, this paper discusses the differences of source kitchens for the formation of both conventional and shale oils. The formation of conventional oil pools is a process of hydrocarbons enriching from disperse state under the action of buoyancy, which enables most of the oil pools to be formed outside the source kitchens. The source rock does not necessarily have high abundance of organic matter, but has to have high efficiency and enough amount of hydrocarbon expulsion. The TOC threshold of source rocks for conventional oil accumulations is 0.5%, with the best TOC window ranging from 1% to 3%. The oil pools formed inside the source kitchens, mainly shale oil, are the retention of oil and gas in the source rock and there is no large-scale hydrocarbon migration and enrichment process happened, which requires better quality and bigger scale of source rocks. The threshold of TOC for medium to high maturity of shale oil is 2%, with the best range falling in 3%–5%. Medium to low mature shale oil resource has a TOC threshold of 6%, and the higher the better in particular. The most favorable kerogen for both high and low-mature shale oils is oil-prone type of I–II1. Carrying out source rock quality and classification evaluation and looking for large-scale and high-quality source rock enrichment areas are a scientific issue that must be paid attention to when exploration activity changes from out-of-source regions to in-source kitchen areas. The purpose is to provide theoretical guidance for the upcoming shale oil enrichment area selection, economic discovery and objective evaluation of resource potential.

Temperature Distribution Characteristics of Steel Circular Tube Members under Oil Pool Fire Conditions: Experiment and Numerical Simulation

Temperature Distribution Characteristics of Steel Circular Tube Members under Oil Pool Fire Conditions: Experiment and Numerical Simulation

Impacts of Deepwater Horizon on Fish and Fisheries: What Have we Learned about Resilience and Vulnerability in a Coupled Human-Natural System?

Abstract The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill occurred in a region of the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) supporting abundant, diverse and valuable communities of fishes and fishers. The economy of the northern GoM is inextricably tied to the natural resource bases of the region (tourism, fishing, oil and gas, etc.) and thus the coupling between the human and ecological systems is tight and subject both feed-back and, to some extent, feed-forward controls. Management actions taken during the 87-day DWH spill incident included the closure of over 280,000 km2 of productive fishing area (about 1/3 of USA federal waters in the GoM), resulting in significant declines in catches and revenues for some critical species for several months after the spill. As well, a variety of oil spill countermeasures including the use of chemical dispersants (at the well head and the sea surface), releases of freshwater into marshes to staunch the progression of oil ashore, creation of sand berms, burning of oil at sea and mechanical pickup were employed. Because of the closures, fishers were compensated for lost fishing opportunities in a number of ways, including employment in oil spill response efforts (the VoO or Vessel of Opportunity program), accepting compensation payments from the Responsible Parties, and moving fishing areas and shifting to open areas of the GoM. Some fisheries were heavily impacted during 2010 (e.g., menhaden and inshore invertebrate fisheries), while for others, area shifting resulted in little change in GoM-wide fishery catches (e.g., red snapper, penaeid shrimps). In the 10 years since the DWH disaster, many fisheries have recovered, exhibiting patterns of inter-annual variability consistent with those seen prior to the spill, but other species have shown little to no recovery. One of the critical issues in understanding oil spill effects is that of causal inference given multiple simultaneous drivers and feedbacks, thus the appeal of viewing fish-fishery interactions as a coupled human and natural system. Results of long-term monitoring studies document a variety of responses of various taxa occupying diverse habitats from estuarine/coastal to open ocean. These impacts resulted both from oil contamination and from various response countermeasures. Differential recovery trajectories are mediated by life history aspects contributing to resilience and to some extent the degree of ongoing contamination from pools of residual oil and other chronic sources. Relatively resilient species were those exhibiting low to moderate modularity (near ubiquitous species or populations) and those with relatively short life cycles. Fishing community resilience to the spill was related to a variety of employment alternatives during closures and facilitated by the capacity of fishers to adapt to non-traditional opportunities in fishing and by financial assistance programs. Overall, the level of business failures during and just after DWH was lower than historical averages for important reef fish fisheries of the Gulf.

Stratigraphy and hydrocarbon resources of the San Juan Basin: Lessons for other basins, lessons from other basins

This paper examines the relationships between stratigraphy and hydrocarbon production from the San Juan Basin of New Mexico and Colorado. Abundant data and the long production history allow lessons to be learned, both from an exploration and development perspective, that can be applied in other basins. Conversely, as new play types and technologies are defined and developed elsewhere, the applicability of those tools in the San Juan Basin needs to be understood for well-informed exploration and development activities to continue. The San Juan Basin is a Latest Cretaceous – Tertiary (Paleogene) structure that contains rocks deposited from the Lower Paleozoic to the Tertiary, but only the Upper Cretaceous section has significant hydrocarbon, mostly gas, production. Herein I make the case for studying depositional systems, and the controls thereon (e.g., basin development, eustasy, sediment supply), because they are the first-order controls on whether a sedimentary basin can become a hydrocarbon province, or super basin as the San Juan Basin has recently been defined. Only in the Upper Cretaceous did a suitable combination of forcing mechanisms combine to form source and reservoir rocks, and repeated transgressive-regressive cycles of the Upper Cretaceous stacked multiple successions of source and reservoir rocks in a way that leads to stacked pay potential. Because of the types of depositional systems that could develop, the source rocks were primarily gas prone, like those of other Rocky Mountain basins. Oil-prone source rocks are present but primarily restricted to episodes of peak transgression. A lack of suitable trapping mechanisms helps to explain the relative dearth of conventional oil pools. Although gas production has dropped precipitously in the past decade, driven primarily by overabundance of gas supply associated with the shale-gas boom, the combination of horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing is being applied to revive oil production from some unconventional stratigraphic targets with success.

Marangoni fireworks: Atomization dynamics of binary droplets on an oil pool

Surface tension gradient due to concentration and temperature differences induces Marangoni forces. The Marangoni effect has been extensively studied to understand its fundamental underlying physics and its industrial applications. This paper describes the spreading and atomization dynamics of an aqueous 2-propanol (IPA) solution on sunflower oil. The spreading and self-atomization of droplets by the Marangoni effect with the evaporation of volatile components are herein observed. With 40 wt. % IPA solution droplets on sunflower oil, firework-like behavior was demonstrated with the Marangoni effect. To better understand the interplay between the evaporation and spreading/atomization characteristics, the temperature field on the oil pool was visualized and quantified using an infrared camera. The Marangoni flow driven by the temperature gradient near the spreading front was estimated and compared with the experimental spreading velocity. The experimental spreading velocity of the liquid film was found to roughly agree with the model prediction. By the atomization of the spreading IPA solution, thousands of atomized daughter droplets were counted, and the size distribution was determined. Additionally, fingering instability at the interface of the IPA solution and sunflower oil was quantitatively discussed, and the resulting wavelength on its interface was compared with the capillary model. We hope that our demonstration stimulates further studies that will yield deeper insights into the spreading and atomization dynamics of volatile binary droplets on a liquid pool.

The identification of fire potentials in oil mining area on Minas Sumatera Operations-Indonesia by manual assessment method

The petroleum industry both mining and crude oil processing has a high level of fire risk. This can be caused by the hydrocarbons from the content of mining products, crude oil content to the fuel which is contained in the area around processing. Where, if there is a fire in the surround area can cause a terrible explosion in the oil tank or pool fire. To identify the potential fires, a manual assessment method can be carried out by: making clusters and grouping of production activities, risk matrix table of industrial activities, field observations, identification of hazard materials, analyzes and actions in accordance with the standard operating procedures applied in the company. From the results of observations on the oil and gas industry in Sumatra – Operation Indonesia, generally the identification of potential fires is good, there are several factors that must be taken so the zero accidents in the oil industry can be fully satisfied.

Development and validation of a gas chromatography with a flame ionization detector method for quantitative analysis of four major fatty acids extracted shark liver oil

Context: The shark liver of the species Ginglimostoma cirratun, Carcharhinus longimanus, and Carcharhinus falciformis, captured in the north-central coast of Cuba are a source of oil, whose content of major fatty acids could be used in its quality control. Aims: To develop a simple and robust gas chromatography with a flame ionization detector (GC-FID) method that is suitable for routine analysis of four major fatty acids extracted shark liver oil. Methods: Four major fatty acid content in shark liver oil pool of species Ginglimostoma cirratun, Carcharhinus longimanus, and Carcharhinus falciformis, was analyzed through the gas chromatography with a GC-FID. The fatty acids were analyzed as methyl esters derivatives, using 5% aqueous sulfuric acid in methanol. The method was validated in terms of linearity, precision, accuracy, specificity and limit of detection and quantitation. Results: Under the optimum analytical conditions, the analysis revealed that each target component was well separated with satisfactory recoveries and reproducibility. The method linearity was found to be high with good determination coefficient values for all target components. The evaluation of the matrix effect, demonstrated, that there is not interference from substances other than analysis. The method was also found to be accurate, precise and reproducible and it was applied to the quantitative determination of the fatty acid content in shark liver oil pool; oleic acid was the most abundant fatty acid (22.69%), followed by palmitic (18.85%), stearic (6.01 %) and myristic acid (0.40 %). Conclusions: The GC-FID developed method is reliable and suitable for determination of four major fatty acids in shark liver oil pool.

Big data intelligent platform and application analysis for oil and gas resource development

With the rapid improvement of exploration and monitoring technologies, the oil and gas industry has accumulated a large amount of data in the fields of seismic exploration, logging, production, and development. How to transform the huge “data resources” into “data assets” and fully utilize data and tap their real value to better serve society is a main concern in the oil and gas industry today. Therefore, the oil industry needs to complete the industrial upgrading of “Smart Oilfield” through digital and intelligent transformation. In recent years, the rise of big data technology and artificial intelligence have allowed international oil companies and oil service giants to accelerate the construction of digital and intelligent oil fields. The overall framework of the big data intelligent platform of oil and gas resources should be based on data resources with big data platform computing power as the support and artificial intelligence algorithms as the core. To meet the production needs of the oil and gas industry, it is of great urgency to build an oil and gas data resource pool that integrates exploration, development, and production data. The data quality can be improved via data cleaning and fusion. Physical simulations, data mining, and other approaches should be combined to achieve the modularization of service functions. Additionally, the goals of intelligent monitoring, early warning, and display on multi-dimensional platforms such as PC, control screen, and mobile apps can also be achieved. The analysis of artificial intelligence methods such as deep learning in the context of the oil and gas industry shows that these methods have good application prospects. In the future, oil companies should work together with scientific research institutes to tap the huge potential of oil industry data, achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase, and build a new smart oil and gas industrial ecosystem to complete industrial upgrading.

Geochemical advances in Arctic Alaska oil typing – North Slope oil correlation and charge history

The Arctic Alaska petroleum province is geologically and geochemically complex. Mixed hydrocarbon charge from multiple source rocks and/or levels of thermal maturity is common within an individual oil pool. Biomarker and chemometric statistical analyses were used to correlate twenty-nine oils to five oil families derived from: (1) Triassic Shublik Formation (calcareous organofacies), (2) Triassic Shublik Formation (shaly organofacies), (3) Jurassic Kingak Shale, (4) Cretaceous shale (pebble shale unit and Hue Shale), and (5) Paleogene shale (Canning Formation). Age-diagnostic and source-related oil biomarker parameters establish clear genetic relationships between the normal oil-window components and their putative source designations. However, application of diamondoid analyses reveals mixed-oil accumulations with postmature charge contributions (diamondoid-rich and biomarker-poor) in many oils.Most sampled reservoirs contain a predominant charge derived from a single oil-window source plus a minor contribution from one or more higher maturity source(s). Variations in source organofacies also are recognized in the Shublik, Kingak, and Cretaceous oil families. In some cases, oils from multiple pools within a single field display relatively homogeneous geochemical profiles, suggesting a common source and migration pathway. For example, oil from the significant Pikka discovery is inferred to originate mainly from the calcareous Shublik Formation. In other cases, variability among oils from multiple pools within a single field (e.g., Milne Point, Colville River, and Northstar) likely indicates a more complex source, migration, and charge history. Results may be useful for anticipating the composition of oil charge in stratigraphic traps with low-permeability sandstone reservoirs, where oil gravity and other chemical parameters may influence economic viability.

Uncontrollable combustion characteristics of energy storage oil pool: Modelling of mass loss rate and flame merging time of annular pools

Hydrocarbon energy storage has a wide range of applications in modern production and life. Regarded as an important form of energy dissipation, combustion plays an important role in energy storage failure. Energy burning rate and flame shape are the key factors of the combustion system. The classic theories of uncontrollable combustion characteristics for energy storage oil pool will be unable to apply to the cases with annular oil pool burning calculation directly, which never been revealed before. The study of oil energy storage burning rate and flame shape characteristics is of great significance to predict and control the energy storage pool transfer between the fuel surface and the unburned area during the combustion process. Experiments were carried out using an annular pool with an outer diameter that used heptane as fuel. Based on dimensionless theoretical derivation, a non-dimensional correlation is proposed the flame merging time. The received energy heat feedback at the center of pool can explain the change of energy mass loss rate, and a dimensional analysis model with Spalding number was developed to interpret the energy mass loss rate in the energy storage annular pool. Experiments show that the characteristic diameter can be well correlated non-dimensionally with all flame height, indicating that the proposed correlation is applicable not only for annular pools but also for solid burners. The study on these issues have the benefit the current utilization and management of the energy storage oil pool.

Enhanced Oil Recovery Using CO2 in Alaska

Alaska holds more than 68 billion barrels of proved oil reserves and more than 36.7 trillion cubic feet of proved natural gas reserves with some special conditions such as proximity to permafrost, making Alaskan petroleum reserves unique. The low temperature in shallow reservoirs prohibited hydrocarbons’ ideal maturation, thereby generating several heavy and viscous oil accumulations in this state. This also limits the enhanced oil recovery (EOR) options, leaving the thermal methods off the table to avoid permafrost thawing, which can cause wellbore collapse. Several solutions have been attempted for improving oil production from heavy and viscous oil in Alaska; however, they have not yielded the desired recovery, and ultimate recovery factors are still less than the global average. One solution identified as a better alternative is using CO2 as an injecting fluid, alternated by water or mixed with other injectants. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of all studies on using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery purposes in Alaska and highlights common and unique challenges this approach may face. The suitability of CO2-EOR methods in the Alaskan oil pools is examined, and a ranking of the oil pools with publicly available data is provided.

Cavity dynamics of water drop impact onto immiscible oil pool with different viscosity

In this work, we numerically study the impact of a water droplet onto a deep oil pool. Two fluids are immiscible and the viscosity of the pool liquid is changed systematically. We focus on the cavity dynamics during the impact and especially the effects of the pool liquid viscosity and the impacting velocity. For the parameter range explored, we identify the regime where splashing occurs with corolla breaking into droplets, and the regime where no splashing is observed. Similarity is found for the time evolution of cavity depth for fixed impact velocity and different viscosity, if the cavity depth and time are nondimensionalized by the maximal depth and the time when the maximal depth is reached. Effective power-law scalings are also proposed to describe the dependence of the maximal cavity depth and the corresponding time on the impact velocity and pool liquid viscosity, in the term of Froude and Reynolds numbers.

Life span of oil reservoirs: Examples from three old reef pools in Alberta, Canada

After reaching a plateau, the production of oil reservoirs starts to decline, which substantially determines their life expectancy. Declining production data from three 58- to 71-yr-old oil pools in Alberta, Canada, have been documented and analyzed to show and predict their life span. Two declining phases of oil production can be distinguished: a short 4–11-yr substantially declining phase and a long 23–35-yr gradually declining phase. Well-fitted power regressions of the two declining phases of the pools have been observed with high correlation coefficients of 0.95–0.99 and used to forecast future annual oil production for the next 30 yr, yielding projected life spans of at least 88 to 101 yr. These pools have been producing oil at high water cuts of greater than 0.9 for 30–38 yr, currently more than 0.980 and 0.996, but still have potential to continue to deliver for at least another 30 yr. Production data from two pools indicate that 11% of original oil in place and 16%–26% of cumulative oil output were produced at a high water cut of greater than 0.9. These observation results can be used to judge other similar reef oil pools’ future production potential. This study provides a physical example to test the Hubbert curve and implies that the Hubbert curve should provide only the minimum future ultimate recoveries and the shortest future production times.

The effect of the four fire walls to the center pool

According to the characteristics of burning rate of multiple oil pool fire, designing a four fire walls burning model. Influence of the central oil pan height, the fuel volume (oil film thickness) and the distance h between adjacent fire walls on fuel burning rate of central oil pool was studied. The results indicated that: Compared with single oil pool fire, the burning rate of central oil pan is enhanced by the four fire walls and the fire whirls also appears; define three regimes of flame reaction according to the flame shape, including initial state, incline state and merging state; when the gap width between 13cm-16cm, the center pool fire needs the lowest burning time and up to the highest average burning rate.

Research on the temperature measurement of C919 aircraft landing gear during heat treatment

The heat treatment process of C919 aircraft landing gear has to go through a series of strict environments such as vacuum, high temperature, oil quenching, and it has been a difficult problem to accurately measure the temperature of landing gear during heat treatment. A black box hi-temp measurement system is designed on basis of heat transfer theory in this paper. The thermal insulation structures are simulated by finite element analysis software ANSYS, and the simulation results indicate that the system can work continuously for 7 hours at 900 °C. The number and distribution of temperature measurement points are determined according to the standard of AMS 2750E. The temperature variations of measurement points in the process of vacuum furnace heating and oil quenching are real-time recorded by binding the hi-temp measurement system and the landing gear as a whole into the vacuum furnace and oil pool. The results show that the designed hi-temp measurement system has good stability and high accuracy, which is fully capable of withstanding vacuum, high temperature and oil quenching environments. It is the first time in China that this kind of temperature measuring problem has been solved, which is of great significance for the accurate verification of C919 aircraft landing gear during heat treatment process.

EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON BURNING BEHAVIOR OF CRUDE KARANJA OIL POOL FIRE

EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON BURNING BEHAVIOR OF CRUDE KARANJA OIL POOL FIRE

Source and accumulation processes of natural gases in the Qixia Formation in the Northwestern Sichuan Basin, SW China

The Northwestern Sichuan Basin is a hot spot for natural gas exploration, and in recent years, many wells have obtained high-yield commercial gas flows in the Qixia Formation. However, due to the influence of foreland orogeny, the oil and gas in the Qixia Formation often have the characteristics of multisource filling, multistage accumulation and multistage transformation, which results in an unclear understanding of the gas source and the accumulation process. This paper uses the concept of sub-block research through carbon isotope and biomarkers analyses, to carry out gas-gas, gas-source and bitumen-source rock comparisons in different structural belts to determine the natural gas sources. On this basis, basin simulation and fluid inclusion analysis technology are used to determine the stage of hydrocarbon accumulation, and then the accumulation process is determined. Studies have shown that the gas source of the Qixia Formation are different in the different structural belts: (1) The natural gas from the Qixia Formation in the thrust nappe belt mainly originates from the Qiongzhusi Formation source rock; (2) The natural gas from the Qixia Formation in the hidden fault belt is a mixture of the source rock of the Qixia Formation and the source rock of the Qiongzhusi Formation; and (3) The natural gas from the Qixia Formation in the gentle belt mainly originates from the Middle Permian source rock and the Upper Permian Longtan Formation source rock. The Indosinian, Yanshania, and Himalayan movements all have great influence on the formation of the Qixia Formation reservoir in northwestern Sichuan, and the accumulation process of the different structural belts is quite different, but generally, the accumulation process of the different structural belts have experienced three stages: a primary oil pool stage, gas pool stage and reformation and definition stage.