A new practical method to evaluate the Joule-Thomson coefficient for natural gases

Abstract

© 2017, The Author(s). The Joule–Thomson (JT) phenomenon, the study of fluid temperature changes for a given pressure change at constant enthalpy, has great technological and scientific importance for designing, maintenance and prediction of hydrocarbon production. The phenomenon serves vital role in many facets of hydrocarbon production, especially associated with reservoir management such as interpretation of temperature logs of production and injection well, identification of water and gas entry locations in multilayer production scenarios, modelling of thermal response of hydrocarbon reservoirs and prediction of wellbore flowing temperature profile. The purpose of this study is to develop a new method for the evaluation of JT coefficient, as an essential parameter required to account the Joule–Thomson effects while predicting the flowing temperature profile for gas production wells. To do this, a new correction factor, CNM, has been developed through numerical analysis and proposed a practical method to predict CNM which can simplify the prediction of flowing temperature for gas production wells while accounting the Joule–Thomson effect. The developed correlation and methodology were validated through an exhaustive survey which has been conducted with 20 different gas mixture samples. For each sample, the model has been run for a wide range of temperature and pressure conditions, and the model was rigorously verified by comparison of the results estimated throughout the study with the results obtained from HYSYS and Peng–Robinson equation of state. It is observed that model is very simple and robust yet can accurately predict the Joule–Thomson effect.