The authors will present a systematic approach for determining the relief requirements for several process systems common to well site gas conditioning facilities.
A previous paper by the authors outlined several challenges present when relief systems designed for common gas conditioning systems are an afterthought or treated as a commodity item. Because the field often contains hundreds of individual wellsites or gas processing facilities, thousands of individual pressurized systems (each requiring relief protection) and millions of standard cubic feet of natural gas production every day, the facility engineer must develop a philosophy based on sound engineering principles, to ensure adequate relief protection. The facilities engineer, often with purview over design, must do all they can to ease the operators' concerns so that they can primarily focus on optimizing well site production. The oil and gas field operator has a particularly daunting task ensuring operations run safely and reliably in light of the typical number of producing wellsites, the remote nature of the sites, and limited resources. In closing, a work process and generalized checklist will be recommended in order to help facilitate communication between the operator and supplier of these systems, ensuring alignment exists between the operator and packager, and the relief system design is consistent with industry, or operator, standards. The Authors' will share their experience in review of several common packaged, skid mounted systems and provide recommendations for specific relief system design issues commonly found with each type of system. The operator is then left to retrofit appropriate relief systems on delivery, or worse, inadequate overpressure protection systems are placed into service.
Much care is taken during procurement to ensure the packaged equipment meets various operating company standards on a wide range of design details, such as, pressure and temperature rating, metal thickness and corrosion allowances, paint color, and welding procedures however, experience shows that the overpressure protection system design is often overlooked or looked at in isolation, which does not allow the packager to view process hazards outside of the equipment being supplied. These systems may be sold or are often rented to operators for use at their facilities. Gas processing facilities often include standard equipment and process units that are assembled onto one or more skids by the vendor or packager.
0 kommentar(er)
