Development of an Analytical Tool for the Design of Deepwater Riser/Flowline Thermal Insulation Systems

The offshore oil and gas industry is predicting the discovery of more and more deepwater reservoirs. Increased water depths create a requirement for reliable pipelines to economically recover these deepwater fields and also to minimise flow assurance problems. Increased flow assurance problems in deeper waters increase the need for thermally insulated pipelines. This paper presents an overview of the key issues in the analysis and design of thermal insulation systems, identifies and discusses how these are addressed by the design tools developed within the DeFRIS [1] project and presents results used to validate the algorithms incorporated into the design tool.