Surface Production Operations—Volume 2: Design of Gas-Handling Systems and Facilities

Surface Production Operations – Volume 2: Design of Gas-Handling Systems and Facilities is the kind of textbook it is hoped petroleum engineering students never sell back to the bookstore. It is practical and thorough and will travel well among dissimilar facilities and gas producing regions, serving experienced engineers as wells as new graduates.

As the authors promise in their preface, the book provides the "basic concepts and techniques necessary to select, specify, and size gas-handling, -conditioning, and –processing equipment." (They treated oil production operations in Volume 1.)

True to their word, the authors stay basic, addressing math-heavy subjects with a view to field implementation while assuming theory has been grasped elsewhere. For instance, the first substantive chapters, as is appropriate for a process dominated by the manipulation of temperature, deals with heat transfer but does so without a single integration or derivative.

This is remarkable because as any engineering student can attest, few thermodynamics equations are linear. That they handled the subject as they did demonstrates that Stewart and Arnold understand, probably through their own worldwide field experience, sizing and installing expensive and complex pieces of equipment is more hammer and tong than theory and calculus is thus rarely useful.

Likewise, in two chapters dealing with hydrates, the scourge of production engineers everywhere and of which surprising little is definitively understood by the petroleum industry, the authors keep their advice familiar and simple. Again staying with relatively basic math and two-dimensional linear curves, one chapter provides methods to determine what sort of hydrate situation a flow stream presents as well as a pragmatic discussion of the chemicals used to meet the situation. The following chapter is a manual-like guide to sizing line heaters and low-temperature exchange heaters, the only other tools available in the fight to keep flow lines from freezing at the pressure drops inevitable along production flow stream paths.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that Arnold and Stewart devote 39 pages to a discussion of safety and environment, based around API recommended practices 14C, 14J dealing with production system installation, and hazards analysis, and safety and environmental RP 75C. The section is a guide for designing safety and environmental management programs, a duty that often falls to engineers posted in areas where such practices are not required by law or common practice and therefore not implemented by the operator.

Finally, apparently anxious to keep their students from a pitfall common to new engineering graduates, the authors provide the reader with a three-chapter inventory of the mundane but essential tools of the production engineer's trade.

One such chapter is dedicated to an audit of the valves, fittings and piping details involved in production facilities, a second to the prime movers and a third to the electrical systems. Again the authors wisely confine their discussions to the job at hand and recommend that a more complete understanding of the electrical and mechanical systems involved may be best explored in the appropriate engineering classes.

Arnold and Stewart write that they were motivated to publish their book when they found themselves without a single, comprehensive source from which to instruct their students. In all likelihood this effort will serve not only their need for a definitive text and reference on the subject, but will also gain a place in university petroleum engineering departments and facility engineers' book shelves worldwide.

Surface Production Operations - Volume 2, Design of Gas-Handling Systems and Facilities by Ken Arnold and Maurice Stewart, published by Gulf Publishing, Houston, Texas. ISBN - 0-88415-822-5, copyright 1989, 1999.

Price: $115 – Available from the publisher or from Oil and Gas Online's Info-Store.