Abstract
Presently, several large deep water natural gas fields are designed to produce over 1000 MMSCFD of gas with low liquid content <20 BBL/MMSCF. Such deep water facilities are typically comprised of ~8-10" diameter well manifolds and 30-40" in diameter 100 mile long flow lines that are operated at high pressure and temperature conditions. Key CAPEX and OPEX decisions for deep water gas facilities include: wellbore tubing and subsea flow line sizing, subsea flow line routing, pigging frequency, pipeline materials, range of allowable operating rates and large production rate variations, and subsea asset integrity management. Key design decisions require knowledge of variations in flow regime over field life, liquid hold-up in the flow lines, liquid entrainment and sand in the fluids in the subsea facilities that may result in erosion at the high operating limit and sand deposition concerns at low operating limit. Given the scarcity of data at conditions similar to wet gas field conditions, current industry-standard multiphase flow simulators predict flow behaviors with a high degree of uncertainty and hence, are known to have been inadequately validated. This paper presents a unique set of high quality wet gas multiphase flow data in a 16" diameter flow loop operated at ambient conditions including several salient measurements such as pressure drop, liquid hold-up, liquid film velocity as a function of liquid film depth, average liquid film velocity, etc. using state-of-the-art instrumentation.
