First Field Deployment of Erosion Control Technology for High Sand Production Wells in Offshore Malaysia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Sand production in oil and gas fields severely affects multiphase flow pipelines, piping and production facilities result in erosion damages and operational difficulties including valves, bends and other geometric fittings leading to loss of primary containment (LOPC). Presently, there is no technology available which can control sand erosion in real-time and help optimize production. This paper aims to present the first field deployment of a uniquely engineered flow modification device in debottlenecking a high sand producing well and maximizing production while reduction in erosion. The sand erosion challenge can be overcome by using a patented Erosion Control Technology (ECT), to deflect and redistribute sand in the product flow stream. ECT has been successfully developed and validated through three test programs between 2016-2019. Following these, ECT technology maturity has been qualified for field application and selected to be deployed by PETRONAS, in one of the offshore fields located in Sabah, Malaysia, which is currently experiencing high erosion due to high sand production. The ECT pipe spool consists of a 3D printed Inconel 718 alloy insert integrated into carbon steel pipe to protect an elbow from sand erosion within the topsides wellhead piping system upstream of the wellhead choke. A control elbow upstream of the ECT device has also been installed to act as a mean of comparison throughout the pilot. The protected elbow and control elbow will be monitored using manual UT at marked locations to measure localized wall thickness variation over the pilot testing period. The pilot is part way through its test program having been installed and commissioned at the end of 2021. Photos of the arrangement are shared in this paper along with the baseline wall thickness measurement. The pilot trial success criteria are to show that the protected elbow will have minimal wall loss compared to the control elbow showing the effectiveness of ECT. The pilot expects ECT to reduce erosion due to sand and safeguard the facilities as well as maximize well production in preventing shortfall in total field production.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".