An Overview of Wellhead Burning: Fundamental Science to Burn Performance Prediction

Abstract

While wellhead burning has been an oil field hazard for generations, the development of capping response technologies and practices by industry experts has enabled the oil exploration community to shift its views of wellhead burning from a hazard to an oil spill response tool. This review covers some of the fundamental scientific aspects and technical issues of wellhead burning that engineers and policy makers will need to consider as this mitigation strategy is examined as a standard oil spill response tactic. For context, we examine a potential wellhead blowout scenario over a range of oil flows and examine the regimes of two-phase pipe flows, their dependence on wellbore velocities and gas-liquid ratios, and how those regimes will influence the burn efficiency with some insight from our experimental observations from two-phase spray burn testing. Among the critical findings that we present is that the worst-case discharge flow rate cannot be assumed to be the worst-case wellhead burning scenario.