Peer Reviewed Papers - Overview

Welcome to the peer-reviewed papers section of Oil and Gas Facilities. Before introducing the papers, I would like to highlight one of my goals as the Executive Editor of this section. Because SPE is an international organization, the papers should reflect that, as is certainly the case in this issue. However, for many members, writing a paper in English is not easy. My goal is to encourage authors to submit papers for peer review that fall within the scope of this journal, and with the assistance of the editorial staff, I am sure we can overcome the language hurdle.

Now to the papers that were selected for this issue. The first comes from Singapore and presents an approach to the statistical analysis of the weather windows of opportunity—the time span during which the stringent conditions required for weather-sensitive marine operations (such as heavy lift, topside float over, and pipeline tie in) are met. The approach is then demonstrated for a hypothetical float over in southeast Asia to show that the use of statistical distributions can significantly enhance the reliability of the weather-window analysis.

The second paper is a joint effort from Russia and Norway, and discusses the optimization of an integrated template structure for an Arctic subsea-production system. The paper first reviews existing systems to establish the current practice, and then discusses the operation and installation of subsea modules to develop a set of parameters that can be used to optimize the template structure. On the basis of these parameters, the authors then performed the optimization to derive the optimal integrated template structure for the Arctic region.

The third paper is also a joint effort, this time from Korea and Norway, and deals with severe slugging in pipeline-riser systems. This flow regime is characterized by large pressure fluctuations at the base of the riser, accompanied by fluctuations in fluid delivery from the top of the riser that have adverse effects on production and equipment. The paper reviews a series of air-/water-flow experiments and compares the observed data with results from a flow simulator. The results obtained show that stability maps, pressure amplitudes, and slug frequencies are in acceptable agreement with each other, but some deviations were seen regarding the slug frequencies at low flow rates.

The final paper comes from the US and deals with mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) for the treatment of shale-gas flowback water. The authors describe how this technology, which is used extensively by the food, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries, can also be applied to recover demineralized water from concentrated brines. MVR could, therefore, become a useful part of the water management for shale-gas developments.

I hope that you will review these interesting papers, and as always, while these papers are peer reviewed, SPE welcomes further discussion, and I invite you to submit a discussion whenever you feel that the content of a particular paper warrants further debate. 

Galen Dino, Consultant

Sudhakar Mahajanam, ConocoPhillips