Abstract:
This research focused on the surface activities of Sirikit oilfield such as well open up,flowline switching, and allocating gas lift to oil well. These activities are known to haveimpact on flowline backpressure and well performance. The operators usually use theirexperience to deal with these activities. However, no one can justify the effect on thewhole system. Therefore the model of crude oil flowline network is necessary in orderto help the operators dealing with these activities. The PIPESIM-GOAL software waschosen to simulate the crude oil flowline network because this software can calculatemultiphase flow in pipeline and optimize oilfield by allocating gas lift to each well. Thissoftware uses the well performance curves of liquid flowrate versus artificial lift fromthe multiphase flow simulator. In this research the well performance curve fromWINGLUE were used. The objectives of this research are to simulate the steady statecrude oil flowline network of Sirikit oilfield and optimize crude oil production byallocating gas lift. There are 4 models that have been developed in this research that arethe model for B, E, L location and model for complete crude oil flowline. These modelswere fine tuned with the actual field data which are oil rate, gross liquid rate, flowtubing head pressure, and flowline pressure. The percentage deviation of predictionresults from actual field data were within 10 percent therefore these models canadequately represent the real flowline network.These models can be applied to production prediction, gas lift optimization, and studyon structural change of facilities in oilfield. For the optimization results of completemodel using data on June 6th, 2002 and September 10th, 2002, the oil production gainsare 44 and 508 sbbl/d respectively under the current field operation and constraints. Inthe study on structural change of facilities, two scenarios were considered. The first onewas the relocation of separator booster pump from L location to F location. Thesimulation results of this scenario shown that the amount of oil gain is around 277sbblld. The second scenario was flowline switching of BF flowline to liquid line. Thesimulation result of this scenario shown that using BF flowline as a gas line is betterthan as a liquid line. The sensitivity analysis of total gas lift quantity on the total crudeoil production and the allocation of gas lift has been done. The results of gas liftallocation to each well of each gas lift quantity can be used as a list of optimum gas liftrate for the wells at different gas lift system condition in the computer assist operation(CAO) system.