Objectives / Scope This paper will discuss how the In House Engineering Department, named Technical Centre – Engineering TC (E) within an upstream Exploration and Production (E&P) Company have managed to fulfill the duties of a design consultant and contributed to the long term development of young engineers. Since 2014, the TC (E) has successfully conducted screening studies, conceptual designs and Front End Engineering Design (FEED) projects of various magnitudes up to 150,000 man-hours. Methods, Procedures, Process In terms of schedule optimization the in house engineering department has tremendously helped company projects in meeting its mandate because the tendering cycle usually associated with any project is not applicable. Furthermore, the engineers part of the in house department are company employees who are well aware about the company's requirements, the condition of the assets and in the best condition to add value from any lessons learned related to past projects. In summary, there is no learning curve as part of the projects implementation. Results, Observations, Conclusions The cost associated from conducting the In House Engineering is much less than if it will be tendered to an outside consultancy company. Besides the cost and time benefits, performing the Front End Loading (FEL) Projects by In House Engineering have resulted in stronger compliance to the company's technical requirements since TC (E) are the custodian of the Company's Engineering standards, better governance because the Value Assurance Reviews are done by the TC (E) technical authorities, and more flexibility to project changes since scope variations can be agreed internally between Company departments. Being a department within an operating company, though, is having its own limitations of fixed organizational structure, inability to promptly acquire resources based on project load and being bound by established tendering and contracting policies has created its own set of challenges. Furthermore, there is some specialized studies part of the conducted projects that needed to be tendered outside due to unavailability of software or expertise. Though there are challenges in managing engineering activities in an E&P Company, the benefits outweigh these challenges. In-House Engineering is adding value to the Company business needs and provides a fit for purpose and cost effective engineering solutions. Novel/Additive Information The novelty of having an In House Engineering department within an E&P Operating Company is adding a value in terms of better resource utilization, cost optimization and compliance to company standards.
Numerous CO2 injection pipeline applications have been developed and implemented in the past decades in the UAE and all around the globe. Transporting the CO2 in dense phase, rather than in gas or liquid phases, is well recognized of being techno-economically attractive with respect to its major CAPEX benefits of optimized pipeline material of construction; which is driven by the high water solubility in dense phase CO2 as well as the optimized pipeline size which is greatly influenced by the density and viscosity characteristics of supercritical/dense phase CO2. In light of the active deployment of dense phase CO2 injection EOR pipeline transportation across the various existing and future CO2 capture facilities across the UAE, ADNOC onshore technical expertise team has been conducting intensive research analysis on the unique thermodynamic aspects of dense phase CO2 pipeline systems. The focus was directed towards understanding the transient characteristics, which directly influence crucial design strategies including and not limited to CO2 purity specifications, CO2 pipeline pressure and temperature operating envelopes as well as the developed operating philosophy which involves start-up, shutdown and depressurization. While optimizing the economics of the carbon capture units (CCUS) is a pivotal strategy mandating rationalizing the dictated purity level of the captured CO2 and valorizing the projects. However, such thrifty initiatives to moderate the costs of the selected CO2 removal technologies can lead to underlying cascading effects of the lower purity recovered CO2 on systems design and its operation. As part of the nation's strategic objective to reduce carbon footprint, CO2 has been recovered for EOR re-injection applications. Relaxing the purity specification met by the CO2 capture units can positively improve the cost of the recovery plant while may potentially have adverse impacts on CO2 pipeline integrity. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the CO2 purity specification on the flow assurance safety performance of dense phase CO2 pipeline. It is worth highlighting that the design of CO2 systems is challenged by the paucity of the available reference design guidelines since domain of CO2 itself is still evolving under an active area of research. Although some previous publications have demonstrated the latent underlying effects of imputiries such as (N2, H2, SO2, NO2, CH4, C2H6, and Argon) on the physical and thermodynamic behavior of CO2 systems, however, this was supported by literature experimental modelling without transient analysis. In this paper, the behavior of varying CO2 purity levels on the design and operational aspects of CO2 pipeline is substantiated and both steady state and transient flow assurance modelling are presented. Gauging the system's design integrity cannot be solely assured from the perspective of steady state behavior and hence this paper's findings provide additional information to that previously published with the detailed modelling applied for varying purity scenarios of captured CO2 streams employed in EOR applications across the UAE. The findings of the analysis are benchmarked against plausible worldwide CO2 compositions with a wide range of impurity levels with further in depth demonstration of the transient effects which are usually absent in the available literature.
In order to find out the opportunities for cost saving, the focus must be directed to the main contributors in the overall cost. In Oil and Gas gathering facilities, one of the main contributors to the overall cost is how the gathering pipeline network is set up. Many field development options are available that depend on the nature of the development i.e. Pad design, Remote Manifolds Stations, and other designs that aim for cost saving. Pad design might be one of the best available options; however, it can be applied in the development of a green field gathering network, where a group of the wells are drilled in specific patterns. For the field where the wells are scattered, Pad design might not be the most cost-effective solution. The sharing of the flow lines is another practical approach that can be applied in, no matter, green or brown field gathering network development. However, one of the main challenges is the loss of production during well testing. This loss is mainly due to shutting down of one well while testing the other. Several options have been studied to compare the current practice of well's tie-in and testing verses the optimized and innovative idea of the flow lines sharing with the consideration of "All-in-One" Multi-phase Flow Meter (MPFM) at the Well head for well testing. Option-1 in brief is to construct a number of new gathering stations and tie-in the wells via individual single flow lines to these stations, while the concept of Option-2 is to use the spare capacities in the existing flow lines and transfer lines to tie-in the new wells to the nearest and close by existing wells. The local MPFM's will be deployed on both new and existing wellheads. If NO spare capacities are available in the existing transfer lines between the gathering stations and central gathering station, then Option-3 is the best fit which is the construction of less number of gathering stations than Option-1 while adopting the concept of flow line sharing and having local MPFM's at the each of the well heads. These options have been evaluated according to ADNOC four pillars comprising of people, performance, profitability and efficiency emphasizing on and without compromising the HSE and asset integrity. The importance of adequacy checks and maximizing the utilization of existing facilities is a "must do" in the current market condition in order to get the maximum return from what has been spent earlier. The results showed that, sharing of the flow lines by combining the flow of two wells has a very high cost benefit verses having individual flow lines per well. The drawback of production losses will be recovered by the deployment of MPFM's at each individual wellhead that provides the well production test data all the time. Therefore, the optimized approach of Oil gathering network will enable the forthcoming projects to move forward with development and get more production with less investment. Though sharing of flowlines with MPFM's at wellheads seems to be the best approach, its direct implementation poses certain challenges because of the current design of MPFM's that require infrastructure (such as power availability) constraints at remote wellhead locations. This paer highlights the need of industry to work and develop a design of MPFM's that minimizes or eliminates such constraints to make this technology widely acceptable in such applications.
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