Development an Easy-to-Use Simulator to Thermodynamic Design of Gas Condensate Reservoir’s Separators

Abstract

Separator design in petroleum engineering is so important because of its important role in the evaluation of optimum parameters and also to achieve to maximum stock tank liquid. However, no simulator exists that simultaneously and directly optimizes the parameters "pressure", "temperature", and so on. On the other hands, Commercial simulators fix one parameter and vary another parameter to achieve the optimum conditions. So, they need long-time simulation. Moreover, gas condensate reservoirs, like another reservoirs, have this problem as well. In present paper, a self-developed simulator applied in the optimized design of gas condensate reservoir's separators by determining optimized pressure, temperature, and number of separators in order to obtain maximized tank liquid volume and minimized tank liquid density utilizing Matlab software and other commercial simulators such as Aspen-Plus, Aspen-Hysys, and PVTi to do a comparison. Also, each software was separately tested with one, two, and three separators to obtain the optimum number of separators. Additionally, Peng-Robinson equation of state (PR EOS) has been applied in the simulation. For simulation input, a set of field data of gas condensate reservoir has been utilized, as well. The results show a good compatibility of this simulator with other simulators but in so little runtime (this simulator calculates the optimum pressure and temperature in a wide range of pressures and temperatures with the help of a simultaneous optimization algorithm in one stage) and the highest stock tank liquid is calculated with this simulator in comparison to other simulators. Also, with the help of this simulator, we are able to obtain the optimum pressure, temperature, and the number of separators in the gas condensate reservoir's separators with any desired properties. Finally, this simulator optimizes the temperatures for each separator and obtains very good results despite the other simulators that fix temperatures for all separators in most times.

Optimization of Oil-Gas Separation in the Production Stations at Abo-Sannan Field: Case Study

“…The purpose of crude oil stabilization is twofold: to align with market specifications and minimize the loss of liquid hydrocarbons within atmospheric storage tanks. This process reduces the volume of intermediate hydrocarbon components like propane and butane that transition to a vapor state, thereby increasing sales liquid volume while reducing vapor pressure (Bakyani et al 2018).…”