Production system integrity in remote assets is a great challenge, conventionally addressed by the application of conservative standards, leading to costly construction materials. There is evidence that API RP14E standard, accepted as standard for erosional velocity estimations and some of the most extended carbon steel CO2 corrosion models, such as NORSOK, generally lead to conservative material loss rates, with strong impact on design and capital costs [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Additionally, there is very little description in the literature of stainless steel CO2 corrosion models.
In this work, an approach to enhanced erosion-corrosion estimations is presented, to cover this gap in material selection. Conventional approaches are incomplete, as they disregard an accurate fluid definition, geometry, flow regimes, the integration of erosion-corrosion phenomena or the validation against experimental and field data. A comprehensive workflow that starts at the fluid characterization, considers the interaction between the phases, includes fluid-dynamic simulation for computation of the flow regime vs. well completion dependence, and calibrates state of art stainless steel erosion-corrosion models with dedicated lab and Calliper field data, was applied to the erosion-corrosion analysis in a gas condensate field.
The results have identified the main material loss mechanism at different points of the well completion and predicted the remaining life of the tubing in different scenarios. This approach enables a deeper insight into erosion-corrosion interaction with the fluid system and enhances the integrity management of an asset.
