Advanced Modeling of Separators for safe Design in Oil / Gas Production Plants

摘要

Safety - in the context of this paper, maintaining vessel integrity during low-temperature operation - is paramount for all Oil & Gas operations. However, mitigating against the effects of low temperature can be very expensive in terms of capital cost associated with low-temperature alloys, or the reduced production resulting from, for example, the need to depressurize a flowline slowly in order to avoid low-temperature situations. It is thus very important to quantify integrity risks very accurately, in order to ensure safe operation but not over-design vessels unnecessarily. Particular consideration must be given to transient operations in oil-gas processing plants. For example, during plant blowdown, separators such as high-pressure (HP) knock-out drums must be able to withstand two-phase inlet flows at high flowrates and very cold temperatures for periods of up to 15 minutes.