Welcome to the peer-reviewed papers section of Oil and Gas Facilities. As I sit down to write this introduction, I am in Houston attending the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC). While this is by far the largest conference that SPE is associated with, it is only one of many. In 2013, SPE was involved with 41 conferences for which papers were submitted and approved for presentation. In the last issue of this publication, I appealed to our readers to submit papers about the projects, systems, and technologies of oil and gas facilities for peer review, and in this issue, I want to say something about the peer-review process.
In my role as executive editor, I am responsible for following the progression of the peer-review process from paper submittal through review and into the resubmittal round(s) until, hopefully, the paper is approved.
What impresses me the most is how the quality of many of the papers improves as part of the process. Our technical editors provide valuable and often very detailed feedback that allows the author(s) to revise the manuscript into an improved paper. While this service is not usually acknowledged in the final paper, it is truly appreciated, and I encourage authors to make full use of the technical editors’ comments.
In this issue, I have selected papers that deal mostly with offshore. The first paper comes from Korea and was presented at last year’s OTC in Brazil. It offers an alternative to offshore stranded gas in the form of a gas-to-liquids floating production, storage, and offloading system. The paper concludes that this concept is not only technically feasible, but that it also offers an economical approach to monetizing these offshore stranded-gas fields.
The second paper comes from China and was presented at 2014 OTC. It is a case study dealing with the startup of a field in the South China Sea, and describes the challenges the project team had to deal with and the solutions that were implemented to start the production ahead of schedule.
The third paper comes from the United States and was presented at last year’s OTC. It addresses the debottlenecking of existing offshore production facilities to safely extend their operating capacities. The author reports on a simple and straightforward desk study that provides a quick, but thorough, method to improve production to take full advantage of favorable reservoir performance, and in doing so, optimizes the capital value of the asset.
Because not all readers are interested in offshore projects, the final paper deals with top-of-the-line (TLC) corrosion in pipelines. It comes from the US and was presented at the 2014 SPE International Oilfield Corrosion Conference and Exhibition in Scotland. The paper reviews the mechanisms of initiation and the prevention of TLC and describes practical, multifaceted techniques to arrive at the best practices for control of this significant form of corrosion.
I hope that you will review these interesting papers. As always, while these papers are peer reviewed, SPE welcomes discussion, and I invite you to submit a discussion whenever you feel that the content of a particular paper warrants further debate.
Gerald Verbeek, Peer-Review Editor,
Verbeek Management Services
Associate Editors
Williams Chirinos, Inexertus
Galen Dino, AMEC Oil and Gas Americas
Sudhakar Mahajanam, ConocoPhillips
