On the economic impact of wax deposition on the oil and gas industry
Ana Sousa, Tiago Ribeiro, Maria João Veloso da Costa Ramos Pereira, Henrique A. Matos
Abstract
Partial and total blockages due to wax deposition in wells and pipelines gather consensus as a billion-dollar problem in the oil and gas industry. However, an exact quantification is still required for production shifts towards heavy and paraffinic oils, extreme climate regions, and ultra-deep offshore oilfields. Motivated by such a problem, this research endeavour developed a case-specific methodology for assessing the economic impact at stake based on state-of-the-art methodologies. It is deemed to perform meta-analyses upon the current scientific and technical literature. It has been found that the economic impact of wax deposition has an expected value of 47.62 billion USD/year and may oscillate between 14.74 and 330.59 billion USD/year. Moreover, the upper bound is deeply influenced by the costs of potential environmental impacts, with a trend for assuming new record values with each new significant spill.