Flow Assurance: A ? Discipline
Authors: Brown Lloyd D. 
Published: October 2008

Flow assurance is a deepwater challenge in our industry. Flow assurance is successful operations that generate a reliable, manageable, and profitable flow of fluids from the reservoir to the sales point. Flow assurance is a critical function for economic production in deepwater. The significant limits of access to seafloor infrastructure in deepwater (&gt; 1200 ft. water depth) transforms operational problems in shallow water production into economic, life limiting events for deepwater assets. Significant operations, project, installation, fabrication, engineering, science, and business efforts are focusing on developing and implementing solutions for successful production in deepwater assets. These efforts are identifying that integration of the proficiencies of these separate disciplines is critical to successful implementation of cost effective, production reliability.

Flow assurance is transformed into a cross-functional, team discipline that drives a holistic, integrated perspective of asset development from project conception to production operations and from reservoir to beyond the sales point. The flow assurance discipline is demanding due to its diverse nature. It requires a simple, success strategy. This strategy can be defined by the components Proficiency, Integration, Implementation, and Improvement or simply PI3 (?3).

Introduction

Flow assurance in the oil and gas industry has taken on new dimensions as the industry has progressed into deeper water, the access to subsea infrastructure becomes increasingly limited, and as accelerated project schedules are required to meet the economic hurdles required in an expanding corporate portfolio. A flow assurance discipline assists our respective corporations, projects, and operations with insuring the design and operations of our assets can produce a profitable, flow stream of fluids from the reservoir to the market in a manner that meets the assets economic, safety, health, and environmental expectations. The purpose of this paper is to review the issues addressed by the flow assurance. Integration of discipline interfaces will be recognized as a key success factor to the diverse and comprehensive responsibilities of the flow assurance discipline. The guidance provided by the(?3 strategy and the focus it provides will be discussed.

Flow Assurance

What is flow assurance? Typically, flow assurance is discussed in terms of the science of the characteristics of production fluids and the engineering of solutions to the challenges those characteristics. The science of and engineering solutions for hydrates, paraffin, asphaltenes, scale, fluid transport, and corrosion have been discussed numerous times in the literature. The fundamental understanding and the computational simulators that these fundamental understandings have developed are allowing significant progress to be made in engineering discussion and design. Science is fundamental to simulation, simulation is fundamental to engineering, and engineering is fundamental to execution and operation. The learnings we have developed are supported by collaborations and independent studies between the technical experts funded in competitive times within each of our budgets.