| Summary: | Master Thesis submitted at MRED school - Msc Petroleum Engineering of the Technical University of Crete for the fulfillment of the requirements of the Msc Course. Summarization: Hydrocarbon exploration becomes complicated due to recent developments in offshore, deepsea and permafrost zones. Field developments in areas never explored before introduce new issues that have to be tackled from the production engineers to achieve economic production rates. Flow assurance in pipelines and specifically hydrate formation, becomes an issue of major importance in the system design of hydrocarbon fields. The objective of this thesis is the assessment of the hydrate forming conditions in a hydrocarbons production system when the system design parameters are varied. The first part is introductory and deals with the flow assurance issues occurring in petroleum industry operations. Subsequently, it focuses on one of the most important flow assurance issues, the hydrate formation. A review on hydrate thermodynamics and probable areas of formation in gas and oil-dominated systems is given, followed by a brief analysis on how hydrate plugs are formed. Finally a short discussion about the hydrate potential as a hydrocarbon resource is given followed by a presentation of all possible remedial applications on the hydrate problem, be it prevention or treatment. The second part deals with hydrate formation on two hydrocarbon systems (Light Oil and Gas condensate) at two developed fields which represent an onshore arctic and a deep offshore region. A sensitivity analysis was done to study how the system parameters affect the hydrate forming conditions. For this task, PROSPER by PetEx, the industry standard production simulation software was utilized to simulate all possible scenaria. The sensitivity analysis is split into two parts. The first discusses the effect of system parameters that affect the well deliverability (VLP curve) and the second deals with the effect of two thermodynamic inhibitors in various concentrations. ...
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