Abstract
The majority of offshore oil and gas platforms are powered by gas turbines, which are the most significant source of CO2 emissions from offshore oil and gas production. Utilizing offshore wind farms to power processing systems can considerably reduce the total amount of CO2 emitted. However, wind energy has the disadvantage of being intermittent.
This work studies the feasibility of maintaining constant export rates of oil and gas with intermittent power supply and operations of the processing facilities. This is accomplished by utilizing the storage capacity of a large oil tank and variable pressure in an export gas pipeline (line packing and drafting). These methods and the required dimensions are evaluated. This study is based on a case study of an offshore field located on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS).
This study was performed using numerical modeling. The results indicate that the optimal oil tank capacity can be determined for different amounts of fixed desired export oil rates. The required size of the oil tanks is within the range of dimensions commonly used for offshore platforms. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that the export gas rate can be maintained by altering the pressure distribution within a reasonable range.
