Integrated Technologies Ensuring Integrity Throughout the Facility Lifecycle
Authors: Dange Aarti , Varghese George , Mesbah Hossam 
Published: September 2021

Objective/Scope

Integrity of the wells and facilities is planned right from the reservoir development phase. In the pilot phase all the contributing parameters are collected and considered in the design of the production facilities. As the corrosion/erosion is very important aspect to determine the operating condition and the metallurgy of the facilities/completion, due consideration must be given to the technologies helping the infrastructure planning. However, once the production begins, the real time corrosion monitoring is essential as the reservoir produces from multiple zones along with solids during the complete lifecycle. The sand erosion aggravates the corrosion and can cause leaks around the wellheads and areas with changes in cross section. There are several processes such as inhibitor dosage, chemical treatment are performed from the startup and continued throughout the pilot. The paper covers integrated technologies to minimize the risk of corrosion damages by providing predictive analytics for corrosion and erosion impact. This includes chemical injection system, trace detector, non-intrusive corrosion monitoring, sand detector technologies as a holistic solution and best practice for ensuring asset integrity.

Methods, Procedures, Process

With the given information on the fluid corrosivity, the corrosion inhibitor and its dosing rate gets identified. Continous injection leads to the formation of a thin film on the entire system which need to be protected. However, many times the dosage is not optimized often leading to over injection or under injection of the chemicals. The injection rate is important to be monitored and optimized with a Realtime corrosion monitoring and gauging the impact on the asset integrity. The non-intrusive easy to install Realtime corrosion monitoring probe can provide real time monitoring for all the above requirements and in remote locations inaccessible during inspection A tracer is added to the chemicals to identify the residual through the tracer meter, which is hooked up with the chemical injection system, to optimize the set dosing rate. The corrosion monitoring system is in a corrosion prone location where the highest corrosion rate is expected to optimize the dosage. The sand detector can be considered in case we are producing from unconsolidated sand reservoir. This helps to identify erosion and where more sand is expected.

Results, Observations, Conclusions

Integrating all these technologies helps optimize the chemical used by around 20% and maximize the lifetime for the integrity by 70%. Also, it predicts potential failures in the system.

As the data is stored and accessed from different locations, the organization will have a better control on the full integrity which lead to better design and alternating the corrosion inhibitor without any risk on the integrity.

However, the combined technologies will be high CAPEX, but it will save a lot of OPEX on the long run which is demonstrated in the paper and will provide a good historical data for the field development and overall production enhancement