Abandonment Best Practices in Unitised Area for Wells and Facilities Straddling Two Countries in Malay Basin: A Case Study

Abandonment is considered to be the last stage in the oil gas field cycle. Oil and gas industries around the world are bounded by the necessity of creating an abandonment program which is technically sound, complied to the stringent HSE requirement and to be cost-effective. Abandonment strategies were always planned as early as during the field development plan. When there are no remaining opportunities left or no commercially viable hydrocarbon is present, the field need to be abandoned to save operating and maintenance cost. The cost associated on abandonment can often be paid to the host government periodically and can be cost recoverable once the field is ready to be abandoned. In Malaysia, some of the oil producing fields are now in the late life of production thus abandonment strategies are being studied comprehensively. The interest of this paper is to share the case study of one of a field that is in its late life of production and has wells and facilities that planned to be abandon soon. The abandonment in this field is challenging because it involves two countries, as this field is in the hydrocarbon structure that straddling two countries. Series of techno-commercial discussion were held between operators of these two countries to gain an integrated understanding of the opportunity, defining a successful outcome of the opportunity and creating an aligned plan to achieve successful abandonment campaign. Thus, this paper will discuss on technical aspects of creating a caprock model, the execution strategies of abandoning the wells and facilities and economic analysis to study whether a joint campaign between the operators from two countries yields significantly lower costs or otherwise.

Roles of Nanostructured Bimetallic Supported on Alumina-Zeolite (AZ) in Light Cycle Oil (LCO) Upgrading

Light cycle oil (LCO) is one of the major products in Fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) processes, and has drawbacks such as high aromatics, sulfur, and nitrogen contents, and low cetane number (CN). Hydro-upgrading is one of the most typical processes for LCO upgrading, and alumina-zeolite (AZ) is an effective hydrotreating catalyst support. This paper examined the effects of different bimetallic catalysts (CoMo/AZ, NiMo/AZ, and NiW/AZ) supported by AZ on hydro-upgrading of both model compounds and real LCO. CoMo/AZ preferred the direct desulfurization (DDS) route while the NiMo/AZ and NiW/AZ catalysts favored the desulfurization route through hydrogenation (HYD). The presence of nitrogen compounds in the feed introduced a competitive adsorption mechanism and reduced the number of available acid sites. Aromatics were partially hydrogenated into methyltetralines at first, and then further hydrogenated, cracked, and isomerized into methyldecalins, monocyclic, and methyltetralines isomers. CoMo/AZ is the best hydrodesulfurization (HDS) catalyst for the model compounds at low H2 pressure (550 psi) and for LCO at lower temperature (573 K), while NiMo/AZ performs the best for LCO at higher temperature (648 K). NiMo/AZ is the best hydrodenitrogenation (HDN) catalyst for LCO. The hydrodearomatization (HDA) performances of NiMo/AZ and NiW/AZ improved significantly and overwhelmingly higher than that of the CoMo/AZ when the H2 pressure was increased to 1100 psi.

Effect of the chemical composition of six hydrotreated light cycle oils for benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene production by a hydrocracking process

The effect of the chemical composition of the hydrotreated light cycle oil (HDT LCO) on the benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene (BTEX) production by a hydrocracking (HCK) procedure, is presented. Six different types of HDT LCOs were obtained by submitting two types of LCOs to hydrotreating (HDT) with different catalysts and experimental conditions. The products were analyzed as mono-, di- and tri-aromatic compounds using the supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) method (ASTM D5186). The HDT LCOs were subjected to HCK with a 50/50 in weight mixture of nickel-molybdenum on alumina (NiMo/Al2O3) and H-ZSM5 (NiMo/H-ZSM5, 50/50) at 375 °C, 7.5 MPa, 1.2 h−1, and 750 m3/m3 H2/Oil. The HCK products were analyzed by gas chromatography with a flame ionization detector (GC-FID) and divided into five groups: gas, light hydrocarbons (LHCs), BTEX, middle hydrocarbons (MHCs), and heavy hydrocarbons (HHCs).The results showed that the BTEX formation ranged from 27.0 to 29.8 wt.% and it did not show a significant dependence on the mono-aromatic (59.9 and 75.6 wt.%), total aromatic (61.1–84.2 wt.%) contents or MHCs conversion (58.3–64.3 wt.%) from the departing HDT LCO feedstock. This result implies that, contrary to previous expectations, the BTEX formation does not directly depend on the amounts of total or mono-aromatic compounds when departing from real feedstocks. A GC-PIONA (paraffin, isoparaffin, olefin, naphthene, aromatic) characterization method (ASTM D6623) for mechanism understanding purpose was also carried out.

Crude Slate, FCC Slurry Oil, Recycle, and Operating Conditions Effects on H-Oil® Product Quality

This paper evaluates the influence of crude oil (vacuum residue) properties, the processing of fluid catalytic cracking slurry oil, and recycle of hydrocracked vacuum residue diluted with fluid catalytic cracking heavy cycle oil, and the operating conditions of the H-Oil vacuum residue hydrocracking on the quality of the H-Oil liquid products. 36 cases of operation of a commercial H-Oil® ebullated bed hydrocracker were studied at different feed composition, and different operating conditions. Intercriteria analysis was employed to define the statistically meaningful relations between 135 parameters including operating conditions, feed and products characteristics. Correlations and regression equations which related the H-Oil® mixed feed quality and the operating conditions (reaction temperature, and reaction time (throughput)) to the liquid H-Oil® products quality were developed. The developed equations can be used to find the optimal performance of the whole refinery considering that the H-Oil liquid products are part of the feed for the units: fluid catalytic cracking, hydrotreating, road pavement bitumen, and blending.

Selective hydrogenation of light cycle oil for BTX and gasoline production purposes

The study of the best experimental conditions and catalyst for the hydrogenation (HYD) of light cycle oil (LCO) for upgrading purposes was carried out. The objective was to examine the ability of two commercial hydrotreatment (HDT) catalysts for selective aromatic saturation. The effect of the hydrotreatment operation parameters (temperature, pressure, liquid hourly space velocity, H2/HC ratio) on the sulfur and nitrogen contents and in the saturation of aromatic hydrocarbons was also investigated. The goal was to obtain the highest conversion to mono-aromatic hydrocarbons from this di-aromatic (naphthalene derivatives) type feedstock, and at the same time to get reasonable hydrodesulfurization (HDS) and hydrodenitrogenation (HDN) performance to avoid contaminant hydrocarbons for the next step (usually hydrocracking, HCK). An appropriate hydrotreated product with the highest concentration of mono-aromatic derivatives, a minimum reduction on the total aromatic content, and suitable decrements of sulfur and nitrogen compounds, was achieved using a cobalt-molybdenum supported on alumina catalyst, at 330 °C, 5.5 MPa, and a liquid hourly space velocity of 1.1 h−1. Additionally, the kinetics of the HDA was studied, assuming a lump characterization into tri-, di- and mono-aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbons, pseudo-first-order reaction rates between these conversions, and thermal losses and diffusional resistances to be undetectable.