Cleaning the produced water in offshore oil production by using plant-wide optimal control strategy

To clean the produced water is always a challenging critical issue in the offshore oil & gas industry. By employing the plant-wide control technology, this paper discussed the opportunity to optimize the most popular hydrocyclone-based Produced Water Treatment (PWT) system. The optimizations of the efficiency control of the de-oiling hydrocyclone and the water level control of the upstream separator, are discussed and formulated. Some of our latest research results on the analysis and control of slugging flows in production well-pipeline-riser systems are also presented. The ultimate objective of this research is to promote a technical breakthrough in the PWT control design, which can lead to the best environmental protection in the oil & gas production, without sacrificing the production capability and production costs.