flow of production has the potential to increase the
flow of profits.
But it’s recovering NGLs that has become an
increasingly attractive advantage of pigging.
“Recovering NGLs is where the money is,” says
Abdel Zellou, who recently joined T.D. Williamson
as Director of Market Development, Gathering and
Midstream. When lines are pigged, NGLs can be
brought to the surface and sold to refiners.
High-Frequency Solution for
Resource-Constrained Producers
Assuming that each new gathering line averages 5
miles (8 km) in length, 400,000 miles (643,720
km) of new lines will translate to 80,000 piggable
sections. Kondratieva says those new, piggable
sections will need to be cleaned with spheres, daily,
to move the liquids, optimize production and
extract valuable NGL condensates.
For producers still relying on manual sphere-
loading and retrieval, that’s a costly and time-
consuming proposition, particularly when a
two-person crew has to travel long distances to
deploy and then retrieve the spheres. For example,
in North Dakota’s Bakken formation a crew would
typically need to drive 50 miles (80 km) each way,
twice a day, to load and recover one sphere. What’s
more, a workforce shortage in the oil and gas
industry, especially in shale plays, has made it more
difficult than ever to find qualified personnel to
operate manual systems.
Additionally, of course, there’s the risk of
environmental contamination in the form of
carbon emissions every time a launcher or receiver
closure is opened to insert or recover a sphere.
Those are some of the reasons that pipeline services
company T.D. Williamson is working in the South
Texas Eagle Ford Shale with one of the world’s largest
oil and natural gas E & P companies to measure the
efficacy of a new automated sphere system for smaller
diameter natural gas gathering lines.
The technology they are testing, the SmartTrap
®
Automated Sphere System – or, more succinctly,
“AutoSphere” – deploys only spheres, the one
function absolutely required for small flow and
branch lines. Accompanied by service support, the
AutoSphere uses the same automation technology
found in T.D. Williamson’s successful AutoCombo
system, which was introduced in 2012 for inline
inspection and pigging of trunk lines.
The brains of the
automation is the
RECOVERING
NGLS IS WHERE
THE MONEY IS.
When lines are
pigged, NGLs can
be brought to the
surface and sold
to refiners.
I N N O V AT I O N S • J A N U A R Y -
M A R C H 2 0 1 4
F E AT U R E S T O R Y
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