Design Considerations of Subsea Cooling Spool

Abstract

Thermal management of subsea pipeline and systems operating in HT/HP fields is major challenge facing the offshore oil and gas industry. Subsea cooling spool is one of the possible solutions to battle this challenge. However, this is an immature technology and more investigations are required to improve its design for future operations. This paper investigates the input variables in order to define the design envelope in terms of practical benefit, input temperature vs. throughput vs. spool length, and verify this by simulations with respect to given design parameters. A mathematical model was developed based on heat transfer theory and simulated using MATLAB. The results indicated that 4.36m of pipe is needed for generating 1 14??"> lower temperature output with a gas inlet temperature of 150 14??/m:t>"> .

Keywords: Subsea, Cooling spool, Heat transfer, High temperature, High pressure