Summary
A lot of equipment is not designed to handle liquids in the operations of a
gathering center or gas booster station. In the study area, some compressors
were having vibration problems because of amounts of liquid condensate in the
flowline caused by sudden changes in pressure and temperature.
The primary objectives of this study are to determine under what pressure
and temperature conditions liquids occur and to determine the proper operating
conditions. The process involves collecting samples in the field, laboratory
analysis, computer equation of state (EOS) modeling of the fluids, and analysis
of the phase regions.
Samples were collected at two different locations in the gas line. The
samples were sent to the laboratory for compositional and PVT analysis, where
physical properties were measured. Compositional analysis was performed on the
gas and the condensate samples, and liquid dropout tests were performed on the
samples.
An EOS simulator was used to characterize the samples and was tuned to match
the pressure, volume, and temperature (PVT) data. The tuned simulator was used
to perform flash calculations to calculate vapor liquid equilibrium (VLE) for
the samples. The simulator was used to develop phase envelopes and physical
properties of the gas to determine the amount of liquid dropout at the current
operating conditions. These phase envelopes were used to determine new
operating conditions to avoid liquid dropout. As anticipated, the primary
solution was an increase in the pressure in the line to avoid the two-phase
region.
© 2009. Society of Petroleum Engineers
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History
- Original manuscript received:
2 September 2008
- Meeting paper published:
3 November 2008
- Revised manuscript received:
14 January 2009
- Manuscript approved:
20 January 2009
- Published online:
14 January 2010
- Version of record:
14 January 2010
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