Improved Oil Recovery methods, such as water injection, is in many instances critical for the overall success of deepwater developments. Depending on the development, water injection may be a project requirement from day one while many times; this may be a requirement later in field life as part of the reservoir engineering team depletion plan. In both instances, many challenges are faced when designing and operating such systems. Although water hammer is a well-known phenomenon, designs from engineering teams many times reflect little regards for these potentially detrimental effects, especially during transient operations such as start-ups or shutdowns. Many times, these issues arise due to the lack of appropriate interfacing between the various project groups between subsurface, subsea, and topsides and understanding the impacts certain key decisions have on the rest of the system. This is true even when both topsides and downhole concerns have been voiced and documented to some extent in the past via lessons learned. The consequences resulting from the lack of integration and information transfer between design teams many times result in catastrophic damage to systems from topsides to reservoir. In addition to potential water hammer risks, additional issues many times exist that may end up affecting system integrity and/or the ultimate oil recovery of a field and hence potentially the overall success of a project. Typically, water injection issues such as lack of injectivity, reservoir souring, or scaling problems most likely could have been mitigated when utilizing an integrated approach during water injection system design. This paper identifies, discusses and analyzes, potential flow assurance and operability risks and generates an all-encompassing work flow process for integrating the design and operation of these water injections systems, in order to optimize water injection and preserve the integrity of the entire system for the intended design life. In addition, this paper provides critical lessons learned from past project experiences in order to help minimize flow assurance risks during the design, construction, installation, and operation of the water injection system.
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