Sempra Energy’s Energía Costa Azul LNG (ECA LNG) subsidiary reached a final investment decision (FID) to build its $2-billion Phase 1 natural gas liquefaction export project in Baja California, Mexico. ECA LNG, a joint venture between Sempra LNG and its Mexico subsidiary IEnova, is the only LNG export project to reach FID in 2020, and is slated to be the first on the Pacific Coast of North America. The facility will connect natural gas supply from Texas and the western US to Mexico and other countries across the Pacific Basin. First production from Phase 1 is expected in late 2024. The company secured a 20-year supply agreement with Mitsui and an affiliate of Total for the purchase of 2.5 mtpa and is working with Total for a potential equity investment in the facility.

The sustained increase in global demand for cleaner fuels continues to drive the gas industry growth. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) has been a key enabler for this growth by making sizeable remote gas re-serves, which are unreachable by pipeline, accessible to the major and emerging gas markets. Every segment of the LNG supply chain has its own set of technical challenges. On the upstream side, many gas resources require significant pre-treatment before liquefaction, and the feed gas to the LNG facility is typically a mixture of various compositions from multiple sources; this composition mix evolves over the life of the project. The main challenge is development planning for the contributing reservoirs under the constraints imposed by the processing facility– managing reservoir deliverability, scheduling & sequencing of wells, and downtime management while maintaining the inlet stream specification. To aid with long-term planning for such assets, a virtual field management system is needed that can emulate a real-world hydrocarbon producing asset by capturing all operational constraints, resource lim-its, and complex operating logic.

This paper describes a comprehensive field management framework that can create an integrated vir-tual asset by coupling reservoir, wells, network, and facilities models and provides an advisory system for efficient asset management. The field management component can replicate any operational logic, exercises holistic control over the sub-surface model, integrates with the surface network model, and provides optimization capabilities. This paper demonstrates this for a complex LNG asset that is fed by sour gas of different compositions from multiple reservoirs.

We describe the different levels of constraints the asset needs to operate under, including treatment plant capacity, the LNG production capacity, the contractual LNG specifications, the disposal of gas impurities and imposes them on the model by utilizing a flexible and extensible logic framework. Con-straints applied at different levels can be mutually competing and their combination with recovery opti-mization goals increases complexity. The unified field management system uses a robust scheme to bal-ance the coupled system under these constraints while optimizing overall recovery. The optimization is enabled through the ability provided by the field management system to query and retroactively control flow entities during the simulation at the desired frequency.

Customization through scripting was necessary to implement this advanced logic and was enabled by the extensible nature of the field management framework. This extensibility, along with native capabili-ties, ensures that any level of complexity can be captured, and the workflow described in this paper can be applied to any hydrocarbon producing asset for short-term and long-term development planning.

ADNOC LNG signed a supply agreement for up to 6 years with Vitol for the sale of 1.8 mtpa of post-2022 LNG volumes, and a 2-year supply agreement with Total for 0.75 mtpa of 2021 and 2022 LNG volumes. The agreements continue ADNOC’s transition to a multi-customer strategy that began in 2019, and follow its investment partnership with Vitol in global storage terminal owner and operator VTTI. Since then, the company shifted from supplying 90% of its LNG to Japan to supplying 90% of LNG to clients in more than eight countries from across southern and southeast Asia. The agreement is also in line with its 2030 gas strategy to deliver value for UAE and meet global demand, which is expected to grow by up to 5% annually over the next 20 years. ADNOC LNG, owned by ADNOC (70%), Mitsui & Co (15%), BP (10%), and Total (5%), produces about 6 mtpa of LNG from its Das Island facilities off the coast of Abu Dhabi.

The Gorgon gas plant produces 15.6 Million Tonnes per Annum (MTPA) Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) from the Gorgon and Jansz-Io subsea gas fields. First LNG production commenced on the Barrow Island, Australia facility in 2016. One of the first systems commissioned was the wastewater treatment, collection and disposal system, a critical support utility for production operations. The Produced Water Disposal (PWD) facility is unique on Barrow Island due the location's national nature reserve status, and all treated waste must be disposed downhole. The objective of this paper is to review key lessons from design, startup and steady state operations. Perspectives will be given on facility/well management and production operations of PWD at the Gorgon plant.

Wastewater on Barrow Island is generated from several sources: Condensed water originating from hydrocarbon gas (separated at gas dehydration and Mono-Ethylene Glycol (MEG) regeneration facilities), drainage and runoff water from the plant, treated sewage effluent and other ad hoc liquid waste. These sources are collected and treated before the final product is pumped into two available onshore disposal wells. One of the challenges initially faced was that the disposal water quality did not meet the design specification required to maintain well performance. This problem reduced as the plant reached steady state operations and the team gained a better understanding of well performance over time. Other current challenges include hydrocarbon carryover and water polishing, so Engineering and Operations work together closely to ensure reliable water disposal and hence LNG production.

This case study will explore the success and lessons learnt in Gorgon PWD through a summary of field data, facility descriptions and experiences. An overview of the design will be given along with photographs of key components. The required design performance will be compared against actual operating data. In the new energy landscape, the Upstream Operators' social license to operate centers around our environmental performance. In our work we demonstrate that it is possible to treat and dispose of waste liquids responsibly while generating cashflow through LNG production.

This paper presents details of a comprehensive array of technical and commercial challenges associated with the feasibility of a long distance deepwater Middle East to India Deepwater Pipeline (MEIDP) providing information on the technical and commercial feasibility of the deepwater gas transportation system, which will reach a record water depth of 3450m, cross two continental slopes, an earthquake subduction zone (the Owen Fracture Zone) and outfall debris of the river Indus fan in 2500m water depth. It examines the techniques, analysis and technology development now available to make such challenging routes increasingly feasible.

The economic and political drivers for such a project are presented together with details of the overall project cost and tariff calculation to allow successful gas utilization by India's gas starved and stranded power stations. The challenges faced by the project from both a design and installation perspective are discussed together with some of the detailed geohazard assessments performed for the pipeline crossing and active fault zone (OFZ) and the Indus Fan.

High pressure trunk lines have proved to be the safest, cheapest way of transporting gas to market for short to medium distances up to 2,500 kilometers, making the proposed SAGE - Middle East to India Deepwater Pipeline the optimal solution for gas delivery to the Indian Subcontinent. Linking Middle East gas fields of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Oman to India across the Arabian Sea for an offshore distance of 1200 kilometers. The MEIDP gas transmission pipeline is designed to transport up to 1.1BCFD gas into the Indian energy markets.

The qualification plan developed with DNVGL is described together with details of the future construction schedule for first Gas.

The Middle East to India Deepwater Pipeline

Pigging Operation is high risk activity in-terms of process safety. Pigging can be safely initiated only when safe operating conditions are maintained at both ends of pipeline. Pigging involves human intervention and thus increasing personnel risk. Deploying smart, keyless system solutions on this fully manual operation for control and safety will definitely enhance safety level. NPCC presents their design and implementation experiences of smart keyless system for pigging on a recent offshore project.

Pigging involves sequential steps and imposes safety risks due to possibility of manual errors; since, significant number of steps and checks involved. High pressure, flammable/toxic gas release may leads to Catastrophic Personal, Asset and Environmental damages. Traditionally, mechanical key interlocking mechanism or similar mechanical safety interlocks deployed, which has inherent deficiencies like mechanical failures, key loss, minimum intelligence/ operator guidance. Ultimate aim is to ensure no pressure/ toxic gas inside pig-trap when opened for inserting/removal of pig-tool. Implementing smart keyless system with safety interlocks overcomes the shortfall of existing system with reliability. Safe methodology ensured through Risk based Assessment.

Pipeline pigging is required mainly to maintain pipeline efficiency, avoids potential flow-assurance issues and helps in corrosion control/integrity. The key design parameters are:

MOV configuration:

As the operation involves a number of MOVs (around 13 MOVs per Scrapper), a 2-wire digital loop was considered with hardwired permissive signal at suitable steps.

Although Pigging is a safety critical sequential process, this smart, keyless, system based sequential Pigging not only resulted in significantly safer operation, provides operator guidance and eliminates error/ negligence. This smart keyless system successfully designed, implemented and tested (FAT, IFAT & SAT) and currently in operation with Client's satisfaction. Automatic logging of pigging operation and reporting are available.

Smart keyless system based interlocks is the integral part of this novel solution and allows the high-risk pigging process to be performed safely with added convenience and security of an electronically integrated system. This paper intends to present a case study based on actual project, highlighting design challenges and experience gained during execution as well as providing HSE benefits to all stakeholders in the upstream hydrocarbon industry.