Abstract
Most operator companies work under a philosophy of responding with mitigation strategies rather than prevention ones to flow assurance problems when they arise. Although mitigation strategies help to maintain a stable production, gas condensate fields require the implementation of proactive techniques to be prepared for future scenarios, especially when it comes to deep water environments, since the combination of the changes in composition of a condensate fluid and the thermodynamic considerations of producing in deep water fields increase the frequency of operational problems and therefore, additional costs and risks.
Furthermore, the concept of management is not frequently applied to the Flow Assurance area as much as the concept of Reservoir Management. Analogous to best Reservoir Management practices, this concept can be translated to the design and operation in the flow assurance area to provide more robust and precise analysis.
Taking these considerations into account, a proactive approach is required, so that operator companies can better prepare and act in an optimum way. This paper presents a Flow Assurance Management Strategy (FAMS) methodology focused on increasing and improving the response capacity through understanding the behavior of production trends, predicting the come up of potential flow assurance problems.
By the implementation of this methodology, we are seeking to operators obtain a full perspective of all the potential problems that will eventually can take place in their fields, identifying, when, where and why they will occur, and thus, allowing to set proactive actions to minimize unexpected potential flow assurance problems.
The objective of this paper is to share a detailed methodology, which is intended to apply for any kind of flow assurance problem, helping operators to implement the best solution according to their capabilities and to set a base to homologate the concept of management, additionally, a short case in which an optimization study was carried out is shown for demonstration purposes.