Oil-field Chemicals in the Changing Face of the Industry

To meet the ever-increasing energy demands, the oil industry continues to push the limits in deep and ultra-deep oil and gas exploration. Crude oil production in deep/ultra-deep water is an extremely capital intensive process in often hostile environments. Ensuring smooth production is immensely challenging due to remoteness of the locations, longer distances and subsea environment, greater depths and extreme temperature, high pressure and corrosive conditions, and problems such as hydrates plugging, wax deposition; foaming and emulsions; or topside operational shut-downs such as from slugging. Intervention and remediation costs for such hindrances can be significantly high, along with substantial losses in revenue, and may often threaten the viability of the project. Thus, with the changing face of the oil and gas industry, flow assurance currently encompasses a wide spectrum of responsibilities such as reliable system deliverability, insulation, operability and performance; production chemistry and system integrity along with safe operations, all of which involve tremendous obligations throughout the entire life cycle of the hydrocarbon exploitation. Achieving maximum production and simultaneously ensuring unimpeded flow through tubings and pipelines can be attained by increasingly robust system designs that however raise overall system economics to staggering heights, not always feasible for especially smaller fields.

With the boom in deep-water production and growth in developing regions such as Latin America, Asia-Pacific and Africa, the global market for oilfield chemicals is forecasted to reach US$31 billion by the year 2015. Oil field chemicals are gaining increasing importance such that chemical usage strongly influences flow system design, operating procedures and implementation of a successful flow assurance strategy. Chemicals indeed provide cost effective and invaluable solutions to various problems that plague the oil and gas production systems from drilling and completion, through fluid transportation to topside operations. Controlling the deposition of hydrates, waxes, asphaltenes, mineral scales, and solids to ensure smooth flow of hydrocarbons through the flow-lines or maintaining the structural integrity of the operator’s assets to improve system performance and longevity and ensuring safe operations during production and transportation along with environmental compliance are overriding concerns that can be effectively managed with chemicals, while striking a balance between cost and system performance. In the harsh subsea environment, where errors can have unfortunate consequences, the oil industry is constantly pushing oilfield chemical companies to develop innovative products that meet a wide range of challenges in terms of quality, reliability, pumpability, deliverability and environmental compliance besides meeting the required performance standards. To rise up to this challenge, the oil chemicals industry continues to put arduous efforts to tailor new-generation chemistries that can sustain the extremes of temperatures and pressure variations in terms of stability and viscosity of the products, are compatible with the materials used in the chemical delivery system, besides successfully meeting stringent chemical performance and delivery requirements. This talk will discuss the transitioning impingent on the oil field chemical industry as the global oil and gas industry shifts to deeper offshore production.