Modelling and assessment of accidental gas release from damaged subsea pipelines

Abstract

Due to the high demand on hydrocarbon exploration nowadays and in future overall the world, the risk potential of Subsea gas and oil leakage increases and can lead to a catastrophic incidents such as explosion, fire or loss stability of subsea constructions. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to assess and control the potential of hazards for the gas flows from subsea pipelines rupture to sea surface with varying of influence parameters on gas plume. 2D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations have been carried out. The influence parameters that contained in the present paper leakage hole sizes and water depths. The Rotvoll experiment data is used in order to validate numerical computational fluid dynamics model. The subsea gas diffusion behavior is investigated for the risk assessment aspect. The main parameters which included to assess the gas dispersion are rising time and fountain height. Observed from our sceneries results that the water depth has a major effect on gas rise time where the deeper water depth is about 3 times longer than the lower water depth to reach water surface whilst the hole size has a high effect on the fountain height where the larges hole size is approximately 2.1 times higher than the smaller hole size. So our objective is helping the petroleum companies to find a mitigation method by modelling and assessing the gas release in order to contain the subsea gas leakage.