OS6C-8：ENGINEERING, ECONOMICS, AND QUALIFICATION OF HYDRATE SLURRY FLOW

Matthew WALSH,
Chevron Energy Technology Company, USA

    Hydrate slurry flow in pipelines is discussed, with a focus on engineering economics, existing slurry flow qualification and deployment strategies, outstanding challenges in design, modeling, and deployment, and the types of investments and data needed in order to meet these challenges. We briefly review available and emerging technologies for deploying hydrate slurry flow, including approximate costs of these technologies. Successful deployment of a hydrate slurry flow application amounts to an engineering solution within the hydrate stability zone, and whether insulation, direct electrical heating, upstream processing, low-dosage hydrate inhibitors, under-dosed thermodynamic inhibition, intermittent thermodynamic inhibitor “pigging”, pipeline coatings, or some steady-state or transient combination of these strategies is used should depend on what option is the most economically and operationally beneficial and aligns with other engineering needs (such as wax concerns or topsides thermal requirements). We discuss the use of existing tools (software and experiments) to forecast transient and steady-state behavior of hydrate-containing fluids, and the investments and data needed to improve these tools; such investments/data include large-scale flowloop data, enhanced visibility at high pressure, sensors capable of mapping out the spatial distribution of hydrates in a pipeline, and large-scale field tests.