Surveillance and Remediation of Wax and Asphaltene Impairment

Managing wax and asphaltene risks is based on 4 basic steps: design, surveillance, mitigation and remediation. While the industry has made great strides in predictive capabilities for wax and asphaltene thermodynamics and deposition over the past two decades, we continue to lose production and plug lines.

Surveillance is the front line of flow assurance. It falls to the production operations and surveillance teams to detect incipient problems and take action. The basic steps are to know your fluids, benchmark your system, and trendline the performance. These observations are subject to large uncertainties introduced by limitations of instrumentation and modeling capabilities. We present examples from subsea production that illustrate both clear and ambiguous cases for action.

Remediation design has many technical, operational and logistical constraints that must be managed to implement a field solution. We discuss a number of field cases of wax and asphaltene restrictions and blockages. Successful (and unsuccessful) remediation methods will be reviewed, including pigging, chemical soaks/flows and coiled tubing jobs.