Well fluid which comes out at well head is normally a multiphase mixture of oil and gas or oil, water and gas. Multiphase flow is widely encountered in the petroleum industry because well fluid is rarely single phase. Many marginal fields have been discovered in recent years. Locating processing facility in every field is not becoming economical. It has necessitated long distance transportation of produced and unprocessed well fluid. The recent R&D results contributed significantly towards the development of this technology with the ultimate goal to transport unprocessed well fluid from the marginal fields to a shore or nearby available process platform system. A feasibility has been established for development of some or the marginal fields using long distance well fluid transportation. In the present study, a review has been made on developments in multiphase transportation, problem of slugging, flow modelling multiphase pumping, metering, and some of long distance pipelines operated in India. Also the feasibilities of well fluid transportation for development of marginal fields XRVA and XPY which are currently under development have been presented.
Well fluid transportation, for short distance (less than 10 km) is quite common in petroleum industry. The produced well fluid is a mixture of oil, water and gas together or oil and gas. Single phase liquid or gas flow at well head is a very rare case. This multiphase produced well fluid is rich with liquid phase in case of oil wells and rich with gaseous phase in case of gas wells. Transportation of this fluid from well head to the processing facility is accomplished through pipelines. AS the distance of pipeline increases, the back pressure on well head increases due to pressure loss in pipeline. This affects the deliverability of the well.
