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77 comments on US Natural Gas: Lessons from BP's Tight Gas Facility in Wamsutter WY

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Gail the Actuary on June 3, 2008 - 7:42pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

What you say sounds right. I received a copy of one of the presentations this afternoon, and was trying to understand what it says about electrification.

According to the presentation, electricity is used for monitoring and for what BP calls "automation". Automation may be monitoring, translated to some action when the monitored results are out of a specified range--perhaps what you call "control equipment".

In the description of electrical use, I also found reference to something saying "power for gas lift pilots". BP has a pilot program in which it is temporarily pumping some of the gas back in (I think) in an attempt to raise production. This is related to deliquification. See slide 14 of the presentation. This may be another use of the electricity.

You mention natural gas being used to run compressors. One use of the compressors would be to make gas move through the pipes. Would compression also provide power for the separation process (into condensate, natural gas, water, and waste gasses), or does this happen some other way? I was originally under the impression that electricity was somehow used in the separation process, but I could be wrong on that. Perhaps it was only the pilot gas lift problem that was being referred to.

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plucky underdog on June 3, 2008 - 9:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

In other installations that I've seen, the solar cells provide power for two purposes...

  • Wellhead instrumentation (two or three pressures, temperature, a few valve positions, intrusion alarm/CCTV) and associated telemetry (line of sight or cellular microwave)
  • Valve actuators - the solar cells power a small hydraulic pump that charges an accumulator, enough to hold the wellhead and downhole safety valves open and operate the wing and choke valves for a few cycles - the latter might be electrical, don't know for sure.

    • This requires very little power. You could put a small genset at the wellpad, but that would be equally expensive, less reliable (more moving parts), more polluting (noise as well as CO2), it would cut into your revenue stream, and (important!) it would have problems providing cold start service (no gas => no power).

    The solar cells and microwave save you from having to run power and C&I cabling to every wellpad - a considerable cost (and theft risk!) in such a geographically spread-out operation. Solar couldn't provide anything like enough power for any serious process or lift energy input, though you might be able to do something along those lines with windmills.

    "Pilots" in Gail's context probably refers to pilot valves (small valves which allow the main valves to be opened by flow or process pressure).

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