Richards

Here we are having made it into our second year!  What a busy year 2006 was – and the good news is that we all have to work twice as hard this year!  I would really, really like to encourage you or your colleagues to submit a paper for publication in this journal on the following topics.  PFC practitioners are a small band of professionals within the larger SPE membership and so I am not flooded out with papers submitted for review.  The vast majority of papers in SPE conferences are related to subsurface and production issues.  I would really like to be snowed under with paper submittals and be able to take on extra Review Chairmen and Technical Editors to peer review papers.

For your information, the topics that this journal covers are technical developments, case histories, and field reports for all aspects of surface-facilities design, project management, operations, and abandonment including onshore/offshore (subsea, platform-based, and floating-based systems), and pipelines for oil and gas developments.  It also covers topics such as liquid natural gas, compressed natural gas, and gas-to-liquid plants, terminals, and transportation concepts.  We are also interested in relevant topics that do not fit the above topics or the more established SPE journals such as risk, economics, HSSEQ etc.

We again have 5 papers for you to read and these are:

Flow Assurance Modelling: Reality Check and Aspects of Transient Operations of Gas-Condensate Pipelines – This was a really interesting paper to review with the subject being a large bore-long subsea pipeline.  This tells you how Statoil managed the flow assurance modelling.  I hope that you enjoy it.

An Investigative Study of Potential Emulsion Problems Before Field Development – This is another good paper that focuses on the essential information needed to design the production and processing facilities – good, reliable fluid data.  This one is from Saudi Arabia and focuses on crude oil emulsions.

Quickly moving on from a technical to an economic subject we have Economics of GTL Plants which attempts to use a high level approach to illustrate the cost of several Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) processes.

Time for a Case Study now, this one Subsea Development of Okwori and Nda Oil Fields, Niger Delta from Nigeria describing Addax’s subsea re-development of a marginal offshore oil field.

Risk Management / Functional Safety: A Practical Approach for End Users and System Integrators explains the high level requirements needed when designing a safety instrumented system.  It explains the failure modes and how to control them.

I hope you enjoy this edition of SPEPFC. Please post your thoughts regarding these papers to the appropriate discussion board by way of the Discussion link found below each title on the Table of Contents page.  If you have any further questions or comments, please feel free to contact me via the SPE membership directory.