Aspen HYSYS Upstream™

Aspen HYSYS Upstream provides industry-standard methods and techniques for handling petroleum fluids and brings together the disciplines of petroleum and process engineering. Production field data can be input in an easy-to-use environment to create an asset-wide model from the reservoir to the back end of the facility. Aspen HYSYS Upstream is a core element of aspenONE™ Process Engineering for Exploration and Production.

Features

Petroleum Fluid Characterization Capabilities

Black Oil Thermodynamics and Methods: Black oil methodology is a non-compositional model, commonly used in the upstream industry for modeling petroleum fluids. At the wellhead, the full compositional breakdown of a fluid is not known, but phase-specific flows and density data are readily available. Thus, a limited set of data, including pressure, temperature, oil specific gravity, gas specific gravity, production GOR and water cut is all that is required to model the behavior of the oil. An industry-standard black oil thermodynamic package from Neotechnology Consultants is integral to Aspen HYSYS Upstream.
Black Oil Flowsheeting: Aspen HYSYS® unit operations typically solve to equilibrium conditions using an equation-of-state or activity model. With Aspen HYSYS Upstream, these unit operations also solve in black oil mode and blend different black oils together. Supported operations include valve, separator, mixer, tee, compressor, expander, heater, cooler, and heat exchanger.
Black Oil Translation: Aspen HYSYS Upstream uniquely translates from black oil to a compositional model using the gas composition and established Aspen HYSYS oil characterization methods to predict a set of hypothetical components that back-match the petroleum fluid characteristics.
PVT: Fluid characterization data from InfoChem's Multiflash is an integral part of Aspen HYSYS Upstream and will create a thermodynamic package inside Aspen HYSYS good to greater than a C82 cut. Aspen HYSYS Upstream can also read a Calsep PVTSIM (licensed separately from Calsep) database of fluids and extract the appropriate production fluid data for use in the facility simulation.
Component Lumping / Delumping: When moving between flowlines and facilities, the number of pseudo components needed to accurately model oil stream changes. Aspen HYSYS Upstream manages this within the flowsheet using the following operations:
- Lumper:. Converts a large number of pure and hypothetical components to a smaller reduced slate of components required by other applications, to improve performance or match known stream characteristics.
- DeLumper: Converts a small set of lumped components back to a complete list of components when the extra fidelity is required, or an allocation back to individual source or well flow composition is required.

Hydraulics Capabilities

Aspen HYSYS Upstream contains new hydraulics capabilities, which consolidates upstream well and flowline technology in the facility modeling environment. This enabling technology offers the ability to create a complete model of an oil & gas asset which can be used to optimally design new assets or troubleshoot and improve existing assets, resulting in improved engineering, operations, and business decisions throughout the asset lifecycle. These capabilities include:

Steady State Network Solver: Provides the ability to solve a network of pipes inside the Aspen HYSYS environment. A hydraulics subflowsheet provides an area to configure and solve complex networks of pipes from a subset of unit operations. The hydraulics subflowsheet is designed to solve in steady state, and that solution can then be used to initialize a dynamic network. Compositional tracking is also supported with version 2006.5.
Transient Flowline Network Solver: Aspen HYSYS Upstream includes AspenTech’s transient flowline network operation. Based on the ProFES software engine⎯with a new easy-to-use interface inside Aspen HYSYS, and initialized from the steady state network solver⎯dynamic multiphase flowline models can be implemented within the Aspen HYSYS environment simply and efficiently.
Hydraulic Interfaces: A standard run-time interface is provided within Aspen HYSYS Upstream to link Aspen HYSYS cases to PIPESIM-NET (licensed separately by Schlumberger) models, enabling the user to create integrated field models to be used for network or gas lift optimization. Also included is a runtime interface to SPT Group’s (formerly Scandpower) OLGA 2000 (licensed separately by SPT), allowing the user to create integrated dynamic models of multiphase flowlines connected to the facilities. The OLGA link connects an Aspen HYSYS dynamic model of the facilities with the pipeline model running in OLGA.

Benefits

Aspen HYSYS Upstream expands Aspen HYSYS capabilities in the oil & gas sector for both reservoir thermodynamics and petroleum hydraulic integration within the production facility simulator. Other benefits include:

Significantly increases production by combining production and process models, adding millions in operating profit (e.g., BP’s Harding asset increased production generating $30MM in additional revenue by using an integrated petroleum and process model description)
Achieves global production optimization, resulting in significant improvements in return on capital employed (ROCE)
Rapidly screens process and production alternatives to select optimum designs saving millions on engineering time and capital expenditure
Saves 30% on engineering man-hours spent transferring, formatting, and analyzing production and process data
Improves current production by 1-5% by de-bottlenecking, increasing throughput, and reducing production costs
Increases knowledge and reduces mistakes in modeling from the sandface through the facility with a thermodynamic description that can be adapted to the required resolution
Increases asset uptime through increased safety and reliability

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