Over the past decade, flow assurance applications have been extremely successful in many offshore deepwater gas and oil project developments, where the cold ambient sea bottom temperature and water depth pose enormous technical challenges. Flow Assurance encompasses a broad range of technical areas, including management of solids such as hydrates, wax, asphaltenes to avoid blockages in subsea equipment and multiphase transport of produced reservoir fluids to a host facility. The high cost of remediation and limited accessibility for intervention of subsea equipment has highlighted the importance of developing robust flow assurance solutions in such severe operating environments. The operating environment that exists in many Russian gas and oil fields - both offshore and onshore - poses similar technical challenges. This paper notionally classifies Russian fields based upon their expected flow assurance issues and challenges and describes issues that are in common between deepwater production and oil and gas developments in Russia. We also demonstrate the applicability of lessons learnt from the deepwater to Russian oil and gas field production.

Keywords:
flow assurance in subsea systems, paraffin remediation, wax remediation, scale remediation, wax inhibition, subsea flow assurance, sub-sea flow assurance, Hydrate Inhibitor, optimization, flow assurance solution
Subjects:
Production Chemistry, Metallurgy and Biology, Flow Assurance, Offshore Facilities and Subsea Systems, Inhibition and remediation of hydrates, scale, paraffin / wax and asphaltene, Hydrates, Flow assurance in subsea systems
Copyright 2006, Society of Petroleum Engineers
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