Technical Sessions
We are delighted to present our 3-day programme to you. Please note this is subject to change. Information is being added regularly so do come back!
WEDNESDAY 15 MAY 2019
Large Capital Project Execution
13:45 - 14:25
The Insoluble Equation: How to Balance Europe’s Natural Gas Supply and Demand
Adrienne Blume, Gulf Energy Information
The balance of supply and demand of natural gas in Europe is approaching a perfect storm, blown by geological, geopolitical and regulatory forces.
Although North Sea production is still very active, supply continues to decline, and production of the giant Groningen field continues to be reduced following earthquakes induced by the depleted reservoir.
On the other side of the equation, Europe's gas demand continues to increase in line with GDP growth. Also, many governments have agreed to phase out coal for power generation; gas is the obvious alternative. Countering this is the unachievable goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 20% of 1990 levels per decade and energy-efficiency initiatives in the industrial sector.
The equation has many unknowns, but there are options for filling the gap. Few technical barriers exist but many geopolitical considerations are on the table, informing views on the security of supply.
Additional gas imports are available via the northern corridor (Russia), the southern corridor (the Caspian) or, with new discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean, from the Middle East and Africa. LNG is available from the usual sources, but with two new and competing players: the ever-growing capacity of Russia's Artic LNG projects, which are cheaply and reliably available now; or from new liquefaction projects yet to start up in the US.
In this paper, we will discuss the choices available to the governments of Europe, along with their relative merits and potential consequences, and paint a picture of just one of several futures for European gas.
15:10 - 15:50
Pursing Local Content Sustainably
David Simmonds, Simmonds Energy Ltd
Project delivery requires both investors and governments to consider local content. Governments usually insist on this to maximise local and state benefits including jobs, achieving this through legislation. Investors, on the other hand, look to minimise cost, maintain schedule and maximise returns. A blanket approach to policy drives inefficiencies through promotion of non-sustainable local goods and services and corrupt practices. There are many examples where it has been difficult to square the circle on these and other stakeholder drivers, and local businesses and communities become the pawns in the final solution. In extremis, projects may not secure sanction eliminating potential for any benefit.
In this presentation, based upon personal experiences in the Oil and Gas sector, I will outline new strategies for local content to successfully deliver major projects AND long term jobs sustainably. These must be project specific and consider improved planning of a region’s infrastructure needs, skills levels, local jobs and growth opportunities. A ‘planned, opportunity driven regional approach’ to project execution will foster a virtuous development cycle tempering the demands of governments, civil societies and local communities, ensuring investors and donors secure more favourable hearings as they look to develop major projects sustainably in a changing world.
15:50 - 16:30
Yamal LNG – A Project Beyond Limits
Christian Bladanet and Christophe Thomas, TechnipFMC
After four years of development, the Yamal LNG plant is now producing at full capacity. From design to operation, through construction, module shipment and commissioning, this article will share some insight of the extraordinary journey of the project, and how a wild white land was turned into a profitable and sustainable plant. Finally, the methodology to validate the operation beyond its nameplate capacity, taking advantage of the coolest months of the year will be described. Through insight of the challenges tackled and amazing pictures of some of the largest modules shipped through the Northern Sea Route, the authors will share some of the passion that made this project come true.
THURSDAY 16 MAY 2019
10:00 - 10:40
Sky: A scenario to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement
Eric Puik, Shell
The Paris Agreement has sent a signal around the world: climate change is a serious issue that governments are determined to address.
Shell published its latest energy-system scenario, called Sky, which illustrates a technically possible, but challenging pathway for society to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Scenarios are not policy proposals – they do not argue for what should be done, nor forecasts – what will be done. They are not predictions, nor Shell business plans and investors should not rely on them to make decisions. Rather, they can help reveal useful insights for the present and provide flexible guidance around which actions and opportunities can form.
LNG and FLNG
11:15 - 11:45
Zero Refrigerant Liquefaction – developments in the ZR LNG Technology
Bill Howe and Geoff Skinner, Gasconsult Limited
Increasing LNG plant complexity and the high capital costs associated with recent mega-scale LNG developments are being challenged to improve project economics and reduce commercial risk. The patented ZR-LNG process requires no external gaseous or liquid hydrocarbon refrigerants, no refrigerant extraction, import system or storage facilities and no ongoing refrigerant make-up. It provides a simpler and safer low-cost liquefaction solution whilst achieving an energy efficiency close to dual mixed refrigerant schemes. Heavy components and aromatics can be removed within the expander-based ZR-LNG liquefaction unit, without need for a scrub column or stand-alone upstream turbo-expander NGL recovery unit, thus significantly reducing investment cost and footprint of the liquefaction train.
This elimination of equipment reduces capital cost and together with the absence of liquid hydrocarbon refrigerants makes the process particularly well suited to FLNG where weight, space constraints and safety are key design drivers.
The paper will describe the design development of a gas turbine driven nominal 1.5 Mtpa FLNG unit and other recent developments around the ZR-LNG process. Data on process efficiency, footprint, weights and costs will be included.
11:45 - 12:15
CeFront – Improved hull design leads to greater stability and better economics for FLNG
Lars Odeskaug, Front Energy; and Saeid Mokhatab, Gas Processing Consultant
Natural gas is the cleanest and most environmentally friendly fossil fuel, and as global demand for natural gas increases, the development of offshore Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) production technology is becoming an important factor in maintaining sustained growth. Although offshore FLNG production concepts have been the focus of research and development for decades, it is only in the last ten years that a few FLNG projects have achieved a Final Investment Decision (FID) and have progressed to detailed design and construction.
The Cefront FLNG vessel provides a more stable and economical platform for the offshore gas pre-treatment and liquefaction processes than conventional ship-shaped hulls. It is a further development of the axisymmetric hull and is more fabrication “friendly” and thereby less costly than earlier designs. The Cefront FLNG vessel has a more efficient topsides layout than the axisymmetric units, and at the same time it has significantly less pitch and roll motions than a conventional ship-shaped hull. This eliminates the need for expensive turret and swivel solutions.
12:15 - 12:45
Compact and Light Weight Boil Off Gas Management
Cinzu Czenn, Sulzer
On a Floating Storage Regasification Unit (FRSU), LNG carrier or on-shore LNG storage, excess boil-off gas (BOG) is inevitable. BOG has to be recondensed for environmental and economic reasons. Conventional BOG recondensers are relatively large columns equipped with structured packing. With limited space on FSRUs and LNG carriers, a smaller unit is preferred.
Sulzer has developed an innovative way to recondensing BOG incorporating its static-mixing technology. Instead of having gas as the continuous phase, liquid is the continuous operation in the new unit. The BOG distribution orifices on its inner pipe enable the unit to operate in a self-regulating manner, and therefore a wide range of load conditions is handled without the need for complex controls. This results in a smaller , lighter recondenser with a lower footprint, suiting it well for FSRUs or LNG carrier application.
This compact and lightweight recondenser has been in successful commercial operation since 2012.
Operations Troubleshooting
13:45 - 14:15
Why Sulphur Plants Plug
Jan Kiebert, Sulphur Experts
Plugging of piping and vessels within modified-Claus sulphur recovery units is extremely common, and the causes are often poorly understood and the proper solutions often improperly implemented. In some cases, the plugging causes additional pressure drop through the sulphur plant, resulting in reduced sulphur plant capacity and possibly limiting the gas plant or refinery throughput as well. In other cases, it results in complete blockage of parts of the sulphur plant, often meaning an unplanned shutdown, high SO2 emissions, expensive turnaround costs, and lost gas plant or refinery production. The first step in dealing with sulphur plant plugging is to have the proper monitoring methods to detect plugging, the right tools to locate where the plugging has occurred, and the right methods to analyze the plugging material in order to determine the root cause(s) of the plugging. The most common root causes of plugging include: soot formation from poor stoichiometry during fuel gas startups and shutdowns; ammonia salt formation from poor reaction furnace destruction and / or over oxidizing process environments; alumina dust from refractory or catalyst pieces and fines; iron based corrosion products from a variety of corrosion mechanisms; and frozen or high viscosity sulphur from incorrect process temperatures or incorrect vessel insulation / heating. The key to avoiding plugging is to understand and avoid these plugging mechanisms in the first place, and processing, design, and procedure options for each of these areas are discussed in this paper. In addition, some of these plugging mechanisms can be reversed on line, and recommended reversal procedures are also covered in the paper. The paper will include actual case studies from a wide variety of gas plant and refinery sulphur plants from around the world.
14:15 - 14:45
Stabilizer Reboilers Fouling Preventive, Mitigation and Enhancement Efforts
Paul, Mishar K - Haradh Gas Plant Department, Saudi Aramco
Abdulrahman Al-Methn - Haradh Gas Plant Department, Saudi Aramco
Taib Abang – Process & Control Systems Department, Saudi Aramco
Mohammed Saati - Process & Control Systems Department, Saudi Aramco
Condensate stabilization unit is designed to produce condensate mainly C3+ by processing HC liquid separated from gas and water through three phase separators (slug catchers and separators). There are two identical trains, each with design capacity of 78 MBD. The condensate is stabilized to achieve the export true vapor pressure specification of 50 psig. Each stabilizer column consist of two identical thermosiphon reboilers with 100% design margin. At a point in time, these reboilers experienced fouling due to salt accumulation on reboilers’ tube surfaces. This fouling may affect the plant throughputs and product specification, which mandating frequent mechanical cleaning. As a result, the plant maintenance and power cost may increase in addition to extensive operational activities with frequent startup and shutdown of the stabilizer units. The root cause was identified and number of enhancement efforts were implemented to boost up the unit performance, manage to operate the unit smoothly and overcome the salt accumulation issue. This paper will highlight the approach taken to identify the source of the salt fouling including evaluating the upstream gas producing. Several path forward also shared to further mitigate this challenge in future.
Keywords: Hydrocarbon (HC), thousand barrels per day (MBD).
15:30 - 16:00
Operational Reliability and Improvement through root case analysis of plant trips
Ahmed Al-Harrasi, PDO Oman
Reliable and safe operations are a cornerstone of PDO’s sustainability, helping to deliver on our business commitment and contribute to our license to production. PDO has embarked on the concept of “Sweat the Assets” to optimize the production and to enable opportunity identification all the way from operators to managers. The implementation of Operational Reliability Improvement Process (ORIP) in Gas Assets was an enabler to the proactive threat mitigation by the gas operations team, with the drive and support from Gas leadership team. ‘No Trip Campaign’ was initiated by Gas team to enhance the current ORIP process, in Jan 2016 to reduce unscheduled deferment by 50%. The main objective is to prevent trips and minimize re-occurrence of identical failure modes through revisiting of previous RCAs and 5-Whys for their completeness and in addressing the root cause of the failure. In addition to this, new comprehensive RCAs were performed to address certain complex failure modes in equipment and process and have embarked on the “Enhanced Problem Solving Team (EPST)” approach to resolve some of these high consequence issues. The “No Trip Campaign” was conducted for 3 of the gas facilities in 2016, which have identified number of improvement measures that will be replicated in other gas facilities. The outcome of this campaign has identified a total of 100+ improvement actions for gas facilities which are being actioned and tracked under the ORIP process for execution. This presentation will highlight the business cases and value realization that were realized in PDO gas facilities.
16:00 - 16:30
Improved availability and reduction of losses on a the Kauther Gas Plant TEG unit
Maraw Al-Harrisi and Muhammad Akiel Anwar, PDO Oman
PDO’s Kauther Gas Plant (KGP) was commissioned in November 2007 with a capacity of 20 MMSCMD. Its Glycol (TEG) dehydration package uses an overhead vapor combustion (OVC) unit to burn the stripping column off gas and provide the required reboiler heating duty.
The TEG plant has experienced major operating issues with higher than expected TEG losses being the most significant. Several studies have been conducted to assess the losses. These included: poor heat transfer in TEG regenerator by OVC;retrograde condensation and carryover of feed gas to the contactor; differences of the feed gas composition to the design; the effect of H2S scavenger and scale inhibitor injection; critical aspects of equipment design; configuration of the equipment and pipe work; vessel internals, instrumentation and control issues; fluid chemistry issues causing foaming and liquid carry-over etc.
This paper outlines a number of the key operational issues on the TEG plant , the approach taken to troubleshoot them and to implement solutions. It will share lessons learned and provide a guideline for good engineering practices for TEG system design and operation.
FRIDAY 17 MAY 2019
Advanced Modelling Techniques / Equipment Advances
09:00 - 09:30
Prevention of Flare Overload During Emergency Depressurization
Marcus England, KBR
Large oil and gas processing installations are commonly equipped with the ability to quickly depressure hydrocarbon inventories to minimise risks in abnormal situations. For the largest installations, it can be case that the flare capacity is insufficient to accommodate the full plant depressurising load at a single time. These plants depressure section by section, to remain within the constraints of the flare capacity. However, despite the fact that simultaneous depressurising of multiple sections may potentially overload the flare system, there is often no physical interlock system to prevent coincident operation of multiple sections; instead administrative systems are used, with a reliance on operator action. It is a concern that during emergency response situations, the potential exists for a flare system to be overloaded. Through the use of dynamic simulation of the flare network and depressurising system this paper demonstrates, via a case study of a large LNG plant, how an emergency depressurising interlock system was designed and implemented, to safeguard the flare system against overload.
09:30 - 10:00
Using Artificial Intelligence to optimise pipeline network design
Andrew Lewis, Augmented Engineering
CAPEX of pipeline networks can be minimised through the simultaneous optimization of pipeline sizing, pipeline route selection, and geographic location of the tees and any compression/pumping stations within a network, whilst ensuring that flow and pressure-loss requirements are respected. However, such an optimization process presents itself as a complex problem that is rarely addressed due to it requiring an unfeasibly large number of manual workflow iterations spanning multiple engineering disciplines. This lack of field layout optimization at the concept-select phase can result in invalid conclusions being made when ranking concepts for further development, with consequential loss in project value being incurred at the earliest of phases. Augmented Engineering Ltd is pioneering technology which leverages cloud-scale compute capacity to apply a combination of engineering calculations, bespoke algorithms and artificial intelligence to automate the optimization process. This paper outlines the complexity of the challenges involved and demonstrates how the aforementioned technologies can be applied to automatically determine the optimum network configuration within a reasonable computational timescale, allowing such optimizations to be performed during the early stages of a project lifecycle.
10:45 - 11:15
Process intensification: H2S and hydrate control for subsea application
Eirini Skylogianni and Hanna K. Knuutila, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
The trend in the oil and gas sector is towards subsea production and processing, where increased modularity of process equipment and reduced weight, size, complexity and footprint are key elements. SUBPRO is a Norwegian center for research-based innovation within subsea production and processing, which together with the most important industrial players in the subsea field aims to address challenges for subsea applications. Today on a typical topside platform, acid gas removal, dehydration and glycol injection take place, giving three different chemical systems. We are working on the development of a new regenerative process for simultaneous removal of H2S and water from the natural gas, which could lead to a more compact, smaller installation with lower energy requirements as well as allow for production from high H2S-concentration gas fields. The feasibility investigation of such complex process requires knowledge of the thermodynamic behavior and physical properties of the proposed system, which can only be obtained by experimental data. Time-consuming and demanding experiments at high pressures have been conducted and provided the basis for the development of models and tools to be used by the industry for the evaluation of this combined process.
11:15 - 11:45
Increasing the efficiency and capacity of two-phase separators
Bart Prast and Tijmen Ton, Twister BV
The increase in the global oil and gas demand is pushing operators to constantly increase production from existing assets. Within these facilities, the separation of oil, water, gas and added chemicals plays a key role in meeting export gas specifications. The carry-over of liquids from a liquid gas separator vessel, however, can easily lead to compressor failure or increase the dewpoint outside specification. Separation of the phases in separators strongly depends on the sizes of the dispersed droplets. The bigger the droplets, the more efficient the separation. By improving the droplet size in the feed stream, the separator capacity can be increased without any modifications to the separator itself or installation of any new additional equipment.
Upstream pressure reducing valves inherently create flow shear, which reduces the mean droplet size. This presentation will review the options available of reduced shear control valves which also maximise droplet size and the advantages this has on separation efficiency for greenfield sites and debottlenecking existing separation facilities.
11:45 - 12:15
Design Emulation and Its Uses in Project Planning, Cost Estimating and Plant Optimisation
Robert Broad, GESMEX and Peter Kauders, CDE Projects Limited
Conceptual Design Emulation (CDE) is logic–based mathematical system that can predict the outcome of the work of a project design team. A complex process unit such as crude distillation unit can be ‘designed’ in under 30 seconds, including the thermal design of two dozen heat exchangers, with conceptual layout dimensions and design package all updated. The piping & valve MTO takes a few minutes. However, no drawings are produced. Models have been built for processes such as integrated crude and vacuum units and distillate hydrocrackers, and are only limited by the need to construct catalogues of engineering data for equipment types and piping materials.
Project costs are found to be approximately linear with capacity, whatever the process. As we build ever larger process plants, the apparent cost exponent goes up relentlessly, irrespective of the process. The concept of the two-thirds rule (or six-tenths rule), is simply mistaken. There is no such logarithmic behaviour. Small process plants have an apparent incremental cost exponent of about 0.3, rising towards 1.0 the larger the facility.
CDE expresses the process flow sheet, equipment types, design bases and design policies that are to be used, all in mathematical form. The consequences of a change in any input parameter can therefore be established in seconds. In essence, CDE removes design risk to the cost estimate. It can also be used for design optimisation.
The comparison between plate-shell and S&T HTXs will be used to illustrate this. Laser welded plate-shell heat exchangers are compact and leak proof. The plate-shell variant is particularly strong and lightweight, and an ideal replacement for the traditional shell and tube heat exchanger given its wide range of service applications. Its potential use in gas processing will be described, and the advantages of using it in a gas plant will be evaluated.