A Critical Review and Future Perspective of Hydrate Mitigation Technologies

Abstract

In petroleum studies, one of the notable challenges involves low assurance. In the past 100 years, one of the flow assurance problems that have dominated the field has been documented to involve deep sub-sea pipelines’ natural gas hydrates (NGH). For the formation of hydrates, favorable conditions include low temperature and high pressure. Therefore, the need to understand hydrate blockages arises from safety concerns, especially due to the need to ensure that safety is assured. Upon the formation of NGH plugs, pipelines tend to shut down. The gas sector ends up incurring millions of dollars daily while grappling with this hydrate blockage problem. Currently, the most common approaches to preventing NGH plugs include thermal heating and thermodynamic inhibitors. Despite their widespread usage, however, these techniques are impractical in deep water operations and have also proved to be environmentally unfriendly and uneconomical due to their cost-intensiveness. Thus, there is a need for contemporary methods through which issues affecting flow assurance could be addressed adequately, especially in environments where conditions continue to favor hydrate formation. It is also notable that in the petroleum sector, there is a paradigm shift in such a way that efforts are geared towards hydrate management, rather than prevention. The aim is to reduce plugging risks. Similarly, multiphase frameworks exhibiting the kinetics of hydrate formation are deemed relevant in supporting strategies of hydrate management. in this paper, the central purpose lies in the review of some of the technologies that have been employed towards hydrate mitigation at the industrial level. The objective is to discern the effectiveness of the selected techniques.