Publications

Some amount of dissolved light-hydrocarbon will naturally produce-in-balance with the crude-oil. These components are easily flashes-off, combustible and considered as oilfield by-product. These light-hydrocarbon shall be removed thru stabilization process, ensuring the oil transportation and storage safety. While oil giving a better economic than gas, stabilization goal is maximizing oil recovery as specification at whatever associated-gas volume.

This paper presented based on actual offshore remote oilfield development in Far-East region that designed with oil stabilization and utilities systems. Wellfluid character is low Gas-Oil-Ratio (GOR) of 200 scf-of-gas/barrel-oil, thus at its 25KBOPD peak production will expect a less than 5 MMscfd of associated-gas after stabilization. Though gas is small volume, its continuously burning/flaring will deviate the environment policy, while contradictorily not expect to decrease production in-lieu of flaring limitation. Remote with no nearby gas facilities lead monetizing small volume appear not attractive, while flue-to-power conversion also technologies constraints due to low heating-value. Those aggravate the dilemma and challenges for light-gas utilization, and environment awareness with recently implied of carbon trade-off in global transaction has pushing-up more pressure to meet zero emission obsession.

This paper aim to demonstrate the comprehensive technical exploration for the light-hydrocarbon utilization by simulation software in determining best envelope of stabilization, evaluating recovery and power generation technologies, and Design-to-Value method implementation to gain best design concept both economic, technologies and environment aspects in finalizing the gas utilization scenario. It describes the pros and cons for each possibility. The performed exercise have successfully implemented into construction design of the facilities with the partial utilization of the recovered light-hydrocarbon to be converted for fuel power generator, leaving the significant amount of continuous gas flaring reduction up to 125 Ktonnes CO2-e/year, and within allowable flow limits of regulation of maximum 2 MMscfd. It accordingly also saving the operation cost for fuel conversion utilization at approximately USD19 mil/year.