A Current Mapping and Predicting of Indonesian Flow Assurance Challenges Based on Fluid Physical Characteristics

Abstract A domain of "flow assurance" is a key concern in the oil and gas industry, and refers to the need to guarantee the flow of oil or gas from reservoirs to processing facilities in the face of a number of engineering challenges, especially in offshore environment. The Indonesian next future exploration and production predicting to be more to deep water offshore, remote production, floating gas production-supply and will face more difficult fluid impurities to be dealt with such increasing volume of produced water, inorganic/ organic scale, mercury and H2S/ CO2. As preliminary, a comprehensive quick review of production and operational problems across the regions both onshore and offshore and PVT fluid data base have been done. These early information on fluid physical characteristics and chemistry can be beneficial to see the potential of tight emulsion, hydrate problems, inorganic scale precipitation or asphaltene/ wax deposition. It is important for flow assurance perspective, to gather all lesson learnt across the offshore production, where these information can be useful for the next future oil and gas exploration and production strategy. As one case, for example, in one of the offshore field in East Kalimantan and Madura East Java, the emulsions were unusual tight where oil-water are difficult to separate and creating a process up set and in the end, creating such lost of production. However, if we look detail across regional geological basin, the emulsion tendency from formation fluids of offshore Kalimantan ever been identified. Furthermore, in the deepwater environment especially, the produced fluids tend to cool significantly, thereby losing the benefit of heat-induced demulsification and causing waxes to precipitate start from downhole, sub sea, trough the surface facilities. The initial base line study have been performed to pick early flow assurance problems base on quick fluid physical characteristic and chemistry from early stage exploration sampling (DST or MDT/PVT). It involves an "integration work flow" of understanding better the physical fluid characteristics from the reservoir and its journey from pore to process facility and it relations to production flow assurance problems. Other important production chemistry and flow assurance issues from Indonesia oil and gas offshore production that being addressed include: gas hydrate, inorganic scale, emulsion, H2S/ CO2 corrosion, reservoir souring (due to waterflood), asphaltene and wax deposition and mercury corrosion. Finally, as a finding, basic reservoir fluid information can be link to the future production problems and flow assurance study has an important role in maximizing the production and minimizing the facility bottle necking.