Vahid Taghikhani - Associate Professor, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Ira

Flow assurance is a relatively new field in the oil and gas industry that deals with the ability of the fluids, to be transported from the well to the surface or production facilities. Recently, it has been shown that in deepwater production, hydrates are the single greatest problem in pipeline flowassurance and are an order of magnitude greater problem than waxes which, in turn, are an order of magnitude greater problem than asphaltene and other scales, In this presentation, the hydrate particle interactions such as the steric and capillary attraction forces and their effect on the hydrate jamming, agglomeration and pipeline plugging by recently developed CSMHyKOLGA computer application in the Center for Hydrate Research (CHR) at Colorado School of Mines in the United States will be discussed. This computer application is a non-standalon application which is pluggedin the popular transient multiphase flow simulators, i.e., OLGA. A demo for this application along with the results of the CSMHyK-OLGA model to a subsea tieback with a typical wellbore, flowline and rise component will be presented. Also the future of platform free scenario in the deepwater oil and gas production will be discussed.

Pipeline flow, Deepwater, Computer application, Flow assurance