Oil & Gas

Oil and gas is a huge global industry with many of the largest corporations in the world. Exploiting the oil and natural gas has been the engine of growth on the world economies providing both energy and chemical raw materials. Both are extracted from natural deposits under the ground throughout the world. They are formed from rotting natural materials subject to enormous pressures over many millennia. One consequence is that the actual chemical components of both oil and gas differ depending on where they are found. Continuous refining technology has been developed to manage these variations and separate the oil and gas into key components such as jet fuel, petrol, asphalt and gasses for downstream processing and usage. The Petrochemicals industry has developed to process these products further into products such as polymers and fibres.

The oil and gas industry faces a number of challenges and opportunities:

• Demand is growing for all the products while new deposits are proving more difficult and expensive to find.

• Political pressures from the countries that own the oil.

• Environmental concerns around the means of extraction.

• Carbon foot print issues on usage

For these reasons and others efforts continue to focus on:-

• Extraction of more oil and gas from existing deposits. Typically up to 50% of discovered oil and gas remains in the deposit at the end of extraction.

• Ensuring refining always operates at the optimum points.

• Greater control on how the oil and gas products are used to avoid waste and allow recycling where possible.

Measurement is a key challenge given the complex, and often two phase nature, of naturally occurring oil and gas.

Process tomography can deliver valuable information for a variety of processes:

• Characterisation of multiphase flows

• Separation of multiphase components (liquid-liquid; solid-liquid, gas-liquid etc)

• Homogeneity of packed beds and process vessels

• In addition process tomography can be a valuable tool in testing and validation of process models such as CFD (computational fluid dynamics).

Register or click on applications and solutions related content on the right to access further information on how Tomography can help your industry.

Publications:

Groth T, Reichwage M, Mewes D and Luke A (2009) Effects of dissolving and degassing phenomena on
mulitphase oil and gas boosting, 14th International Conference Multiphase Production technology, 17-19
June 2009, Cannes, France

Qiu, CH, Bagatin, R, Palmery, S and Bolton GT (2007) On-line visualization of asymmetric multi-phase flowin an industrial flow loop using electrical tomographic techniques, Proceedings of the 5th World Congress onIndustrial Process Tomography, Bergen, Norway, 3-6 September 2007

Hua Li, Wang, Mi, Ying-Xiang, Wu and Lucas, Gary (2008) Volume Flow Rate Measurement in Vertical Oil-in water Pipe Flow using Electrical Impedance Tomography and a Local Probe, 11th Int. Conf. on Multiphase Flow in Industrial Plants, Palermo, Italy

Giguére, R., Fradette, L., Mignon, D. and Tanguy, P.A. (2008) Characterisation of slurry flow regime transitions by ERT, Chemical Engineering Research and Design, Vol. 86, pp 989-996

Giguére, R., Fradette, L., Mignon, D. and Tanguy, P.A. (2008) ERT algorithms for quantitative concentration measurement of multiphase flows, Chemical Engineering Journal, Vol. 141, pp 305-317

Pullum, L, Graham, L, Rudman, M and Hamilton, R (2005) High concentration suspension monitoring,Minerals Engineering, 19, 471-477

Wu, Y., Li, H., Wang, M. and Williams, R.A. (2005) Characterisation of air-water two-phase vertical flowusing electrical resistance imaging, The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, Vol. 83, February 2005

Wang, M. (2005) Impedance mapping of particulate multiphase flows, Flow Measurement and Instrumentation, Vol. 16

Wang, M., Jones, T.F. and Williams, R.A. (2003) Visualisation of asymmetric solids distribution in horizontal swirling flows using electrical resistance tomography, Trans IChemE, Volume 81, Part A, pp854-861

Graham L, Hamilton R, Rudman M, Strode P and Pullum L (2002) Coarse solids concentration profiles in laminar pipe flow, Hydrotransport 15, Banff, Canada, June 2002

White RB, Simic K and Strode PR (2001) The combined use of flow visualisation, electrical resistance Tomography and computational fluid dynamic modelling to study mixing in a pipe, 2nd World Congress of Industrial Process Tomography, Hannover, Germany, 29-31st August 2001

Bennett, M.A. and Williams, R.A. (2004) Monitoring the operation of an oil/water separator using impedance
tomography, Minerals Engineering, Vol. 17, No. 5, pp 605-614

Using electrical capacitance tomography to monitor gas voids in a packed bed of solids, Robert B White,2002 Measurement Science and Technology, 13, 1842-1847

Qiu, C, Hoyle, BS and Podd FJW (2007) Engineering and application of a dual-modality process tomography system, Flow Measurement and Instrumentation, Vol. 18, 247-254

Schlaberg, HI, Qiu, C, Podd, FJW, Jia, X, Primrose, K and Bolton GT (2007) Design and appraisal of a commercial multi-modal tomography system, Proceedings of the 5th World Congress on Industrial Process Tomography, Bergen, Norway, 3-6 September 2007

West, RM and Williams, RA (1999) Opportunities for Data Fusion in Multi-modality Tomography, Proceedings of the 1st World Congress on Industrial Process Tomography, Buxton, UK, 14-17 April 1999