whynotchemeng : Graduate

Hi all, it's now been a couple of months since I last posted so my apologies. I have been going through a transition period where I have now changed roles and moved from one end of the UK to the other for my company so things have been pretty manic!

For this role I have once again been seconded to a major oil and gas design and service company to work on a green field project: the scope is a new twin-jacket offshore oil production rig. I am embedded in the project Process Engineering team and shall be providing engineering support as with my previous role.

The project is just about to enter FEED (front-end engineering and design) so all of the "sexy" engineering is just beginning. Currently I am working on fluid characterisation. For those with no prior knowledge to design a new platform (or any other processing facility) the fluids passing through (in this instance, a live crude with produced water) need to be properly understood and characterised for developing models and calculations.

Samples of the reservoir fluids were taken during the appraise stage drilling for a number of wells and sent to a specialist laboratory where they determine the composition of the fluid, along with various other thermophysical properties. The data is then interpreted by a PVT (thermodynamics) specialist to fit the test results to a modified equation of state (EoS) so that it can be accurately specified in models.

What I have been tasked with is to tune the data that has come back from the EoS reports so that it matches viscosity and density data for varying conditions produced during laboratory testing. Some of this tuning involves quick back-of-the-envelope calculations whilst the other extreme is fairly laborious trial-and-error methods using a PVT software suite.

On that note the new role has so-far proved challenging and I shall try to maintain these monthly posts regularly again now things have settled down. Until next time.....