A viscosity model of waxy-hydrate slurry

Abstract

With the exploration and development of oil and gas fileds going towards into deep-water fields, high waxy reservoir has much more flow assurance issues of encourage complex solids depositions in the transportation system, especially hydrates and wax. Applying risk management such as hydrate slurry technology to control hydrate blockage, has much more economic and technical advantages, comparing to the traditional methods. It is significant to understand the viscosity of the waxy-hydrate slurry using hydrate slurry technology in high wax content reservoir. In this work, based on a simplification idea by coupling the wax content effect into the viscosity, volume and density of the water-in-waxy oil emulsion, a new viscosity model of waxy-hydrate slurry is established according to the Einstein effective medium theory, based on the experiments carried out in a high-pressure rheology system with different wax contents ranging from 0.5 wt%~2.0 wt%. The effect of the complex aggregate coupling wax-hydrate-water is considered by function the non-Newtonian coefficient by four dimensionless parameters. Well-fitting results within an improved deviation of ±15% indicate the feasibility of this method is feasibility. This work can provide a valuable reference for the application of hydrate slurry technology in deep-water fields with high wax content reservoir.

Keywords

Waxy-hydrate slurry / Viscosity / Flow assurance

Declaration of competing interest

There is no conflict of interest of this manuscript.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Beijing National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 3192027); National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U20B6005, 52104069, 51874323); Science Foundation of China University of petroleum-Beijing (Grant No. 2462020YXZZ045, 2462020XKBH012), which are gratefully acknowledged.

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