Vertical Heater Treater in the Oilfield
Heater treaters are one of the multiple options for separation equipment on an oil and gas production site. In this video, our intern (Aaron) alongside Dennis with ARC Energy, gives an in-depth look at the components of a vertical heater treater and explains their respective functions.
0:00 Introduction & Site Walk Down
1:00 Internals of Vertical Heater Treater
1:47 Firetube & External Components
2:23 Pressure Safety Controls
3:07 Liquid Level Control
3:38 Fabrication of Vessel
4:28 More External Components
5:23 Tanks on Site
5:49 Outtro
Automatically generated transcript:
– [Aaron] So one of the first of the many processes in the oil and gas industry is separation, and separation of elements is how what makes each of those elements that you’re trying to sell to the marketplace more valuable. Today, we’re gonna be taking a look into how a heater treater works along with Dennis from ARC Energy as our industry guest speaker.
– I’m Dennis Thomas, Vice President with ARC Energy. And this right here is a vertical heater treater. Kind of gonna give you an overview of how it operates. This is where it all starts. This is where the well was drilled right here. And this is a pumping unit to lift the oil out of the ground. The purpose of the treater is to break the oil and water emulsion. And so when the oil and water and gas comes in this line right here, it goes up there, and then the heat helps break the oil water emulsion. The gas comes off the top and goes out here and goes to that meter run over there.
– So whenever fluid enters through a separation vessel, each component is going to naturally separate on its own just because they have different specific gravities. Well, heat’s going to basically accelerate this process. Heat is also one of the solutions to the emulsion problem within production, which is basically when the water droplets are so suspended within the oil. So heat has many different types of effects. So just increasing the effectiveness of the chemical that is injected within the fluid that removes the film from the water droplets, neutralizing the emulsifying agent, reducing the oil viscosity, and thereby increasing our flow assurance. So one of the first things you’re gonna notice here is the emulsion stream on the left where it’s going to enter this separation vessel. The liquid is gonna deflect to the side walls and the thin film from the diverter where the fluid will hit the diaphragm plate and run down this area of heated pipe which is known as the fire tube, while being broken down by the perforated tray spreader.
– So here’s the fire tube. And it’s generally, of course, in the bottom of the treater, and we want the fire tube to to do all the work. So we have the water is usually right there just above that fire tube. And then we have the level gauge for the interface between the oil and the water. And then you also have another level gauge up top for just the oil.
– This heat comes from a supply gas where a low pressure control valve is regulating the temperature of the heated fluid. So overall, all treaters have some sort of burner management system that regulates the temperature inside as well as the pneumatic and mechanical controls that regulates the pressure inside the heater treaters to make sure that it’s at an appropriate operating pressure and not exceeding the working pressure.
– Two devices on there for safety. One is a back pressure valve that holds the back pressure. You gotta have enough pressure on the treater to dump the liquids out, and at the same time, it relieves anything above a certain pressure, usually about 30 pounds or so. And then you, as a backup, you also have a pressure relief valve, a PSV, on the treater. So if both of those devices fail, then that’s when you can run into the vessel over-pressurizing.
– Have you ever seen a vessel explode?
– No, but I’ve seen ’em swoll up.
– So while pneumatic valves may have more flexibility when it comes to sizing and snap action, when it comes to flute measurements, mechanical controls are usually preferred because they have lower cost of emissions. The water separates downwards through the settling section of both the filter bed through gravity while the warm gas from the settling section goes through the equalizer pipe in order to mix with the cool inlet well stream gas to condense the heavy hydrocarbon molecules. Any liquid from this mixture is returned to the oil stream and exits to the oil outlet. So there are two types of heater treaters. The vertical treaters are gonna tend to be more cost effective while the horizontal treaters are designed for more volumes of fluid, and with higher surface area volumes that comes into contact with the emulsion, you can also expect to see higher flow rates compared to its vertical counterparts.
– How this thing is fabricated is in sections here. You’ve got a well seam here. You’ve got one right there. It looks like it’s a five foot. And then you have, looks like a, maybe two 10-foot sections right there. And what we do is that’s put in our shop, and it’s built in a horizontal position, and we attach all the cylinders together and weld ’em together. Then we install this fire tube flange, and then we install all the nozzles and all the connections. Right here, you have the hydrostatic oil valve, which is the dump valve off of the oil section of the treater. It goes over to the tanks when it dumps off, uses a weight, and it’s based off of hydrostatic pressure on the liquid. Here, you have a manway with an anode connection. That’s for corrosion, helps with that. You got the burner in your stack right here. The fire tube burner got a fuel gas grubber where the gas goes into the burner. Over here, you have the water outlet, and it comes out the bottom, and then it goes up into a water leg, what we call a water leg. It has an adjustable weir up there. Then the water comes out, and it goes into the hydrostatic dump valve for the water. Then it goes to the tank over there. So we have three tanks here on this location, and two of ’em, these two first tanks are oil tanks. The last tank is a water tank. Of course, the oil comes off the top of the treater there, the top side. It goes to these two oil tanks. The water comes off the water leg and the hydrostatic valve on the other side of that treater and goes into that last tank down there.
– A big thanks to our friends at ARC Energy for helping us put this video together. Now, ARC Energy actually supplies high quality equipment to the upstream, midstream, and downstream sectors of our industry. So we can do a lot of videos with them in the future on a variety of topics, and we indeed hope to. But if you, as a viewer, have any type of recommendations or requests, please drop that in the comments below, and we’ll take that into consideration as we pick future topics. Thanks again for watching this video. Be sure to like it, share it, and subscribe to our channel, thanks.