Corrosion and erosion are undesirable by-products of Oil & Gas extraction activities, and one of the main concerns of production engineers. Gravel pack, sand screens, as well as costly chemical injection interventions require investments worth millions of dollars. Unfortunately, corrosion and uncontrolled sand production still generate loss of containment events in upstream activities, forcing operators to set conservative production rates due to the lack of accurate and easy-to-interpret information.
To remain profitable in the Oil & Gas market, operators realize that delivering cost improvements while increasing throughput is key to achieve a healthy financial situation. Corrosion, erosion, and sand production control consume extensive capital and operating expenditures. Despite this, uncontrolled corrosion and sand production generate loss of containment events, forcing operators to set low production rates that delay the returns on project investments. This paper will outline how pervasive sensing technologies deliver Digital Transformation's promise to upstream operators. The paper shares insights on how deploying a combination of non-intrusive sand, erosion, and corrosion monitoring technologies provides a full solution that saves millions of dollars in lost revenue and reputation costs as well as improves safety.
Sand production is an enormous challenge for oil and gas operators that limits throughput, decreases uptime, increases risk, and jeopardizes safety conditions. Sand-related problems are known to surge not only with the maturity of reservoirs but also with the increase of water breakthroughs and during flowback operations. Moreover, based on operational experience, operators have realized that sand production could be regarded as being inevitable in reservoirs with low formation strength (<1000 psi) across the lifecycle of the well.
High fluid velocity also plays a fundamental role in the production systems, fostering piping metal loss due to corrosion and erosion. Furthermore, corrosive agents such as water, carbon dioxide, and salts containing Cl-, HCO3- and SO4- ions will generate an exceptionally corrosive environment for the equipment used to transport hydrocarbons. The corrosive degradation experienced by flow lines is accelerated by the erosive mechanism attributed to the sand impingement from the moving slurry, resulting in a synergistic and even more aggressive effect know as erosion-corrosion1. The previously mentioned phenomena is a form of tribo-corrosion material loss mechanism caused by flowing fluid (in the presence or absence of solid particles) damaging both the surface layers (e.g. passive film or corrosion products) and the base metal. This process receives great attention because of its destructive nature and the fact that this regime of degradation becomes more common due to sand production and the increasing severity of conditions attributed to extracting oil from deeper wells.
