外文翻译毕业设计深水输油管道设计与安装.docVIP

Design and Installation of Deepwater Petroleum Pipelines Jaeyoung Lee, P.E. Marine Pipeline Engineer, Houston 1. Abstract The exploration of offshore gas/oil has been moving to deepwater fields as big reservoirs have been found and technologies have improved. Presently, the most active areas in deepwater gas/oil field development are Africa and the GOM (Gulf of Mexico) in North America. There are many technological challenges in developing deepwater gas/oil fields such as: flow assurance, subsea systems, riser systems, surface production structures, transportation systems, etc. This paper gives an overview of each deepwater field development concern listed above. The design and installation issues of deepwater pipelines are discussed in detail. 2. History of Deepwater Field Developments Since the active pursuit of the deepwater field developments in the mid-80’s, the on set of deepwater depth has not been clearly defined. The manned diving limit of 400 m (1,310 ft) has been widely used to define deepwater depth. Drilling contractors and producers use 610 m (2,000 ft), since a floating structure is considered to be a better fit in this or deeper water depths, compared with the fixed platform. Many industries and MMS (Minerals Management Service) of DOI (Department of Interior) of the United States use 305 m (1,000 ft) as the lower limit of deepwater depth. In this paper, deepwater is defined as any water depth greater than 305 m (1,000 ft). Approximately 200 deepwater discoveries in GOM have been identified by MMS (Table 1). Total estimated worldwide deepwater reserves in 1999 were 26.3 billion boe (barrels of oil equivalent) and increased to 56.8 billion boe in 2001, more than double in two years [1]. Figure 1 shows worldwide deepwater reserves by region. The GOM has shown a remarkable increase in deepwater field developments. Part of this is due to the development of new technologies reducing operational costs and risks, as well a