Introductory Remarks

Wax deposition inside the transportation pipelines is one of the major flow assurance issues for offshore production systems. This deposit may not only get thicker, but also get harder over time. As it gets harder, the deposit removal process becomes more difficult. Proper understanding of wax deposition behavior is required to develop accurate deposition models and cost effective management strategies. Available models rarely achieve acceptable agreement with experimental data without fitting parameters, to the extent that more than 100% uncertainty is common. It is necessary to identify the sources of uncertainty to improve the model capability and up scaling efforts. This presentation will focus on the severity of wax deposition and current state of the knowledge and limitations on wax modeling in upstream pipelines.