MMS 1200: Cooperation on a Subsea Multiphase Flow Meter Application

Abstract PETROBRAS (Brazil) and FLIJENTA (Norway and USA) are since beginning of 1996 working on this multiphase flow metering route development under a Technological Cooperation Agreement. This Cooperation involves flow meters that are making use of innovative arrangements and physical principles, and are being applied to oil-in-water monitoring, water-in-oil monitoring and multiphase (oil, water and gas) flow metering, which also includes a subsea version. All the meters are going to be prior tested at the PETROBRAS Test Site for Multiphase Equipment - a test site, built onshore (Atalia, city of Aracaju) that allows performing highly representative tests, when compared with-actual production installations - in the qualification process aiming at the usage at the PETROBRAS fields. The FLIJENTA conception for a subsea multiphase flow meter (SMFM 1000) will be combined with the PETROBRAS' experience associated to system architecture adequacy to the subsea deep waters deployment and then resulting on the MMS-1200 - a subsea retrievable multiphase meter module. Such module - a guidelineless conception - will be installed on a subsea production manifold (08 wells, 450 m. of water depth, WD, 5 km away from the host FPSO - floating production, storage and off-loading vessel) in the deep water Albacora field in the Campos Basin (April 1997). This paper presents the major characteristics and benefits of the multiphase metering technology and focus on the MMS-1200 description, its development phases, test planning, associated time tables and results obtained up to date. Introduction The main purpose of this multiphase flow metering technological route when applied to be untreated usually produced fluids (e.g., oil, gas, water and occurring solids), without the need to separate them first, is to determine the phases fractions and their associated flow rates. The route is based on multiphase flow meters, which are devices, usually non-intrusive to the flow, that by the combined usage of selected physical principles and flow signal interpretation - under the knowledge of the main physical principles governing multiphase flows - are able to determine the phases (e.g., oil, gas and water) fractions and their actual flow rates. Currently, the trend in the industry is to increase the distance from wellhead to SPVs (stationary production unit). As this distance grows, the costs and problems of traditional systems grow; whereas for multiphase meters the cost is fixed and, in general, the performance improves as the distance grows (due to an increase in wellhead pressure). The shorter well test duration typical of a multiphase meter allows reservoir and operations engineers to have more current data for field management. The oil and gas reserves in deep waters (400 to 1,000 m) and ultra-deep waters (1,000 to 2,000 m) off Brazil correspond to almost 64 % of the total Brazilian oil and natural gas liquid (NGL).