Hello everyone,

I'm a student on an internship, working at a small company who have a few opeartions within the North Sea. One of my tasks is thinking of a way to clean a production separator vessel. Issue is I have no idea how to clean a vessel as it has not been covered in my studies as of yet.

It is suspected that there is a large build up of sluge within a production vessel used to separate oil, water, gas. The vessel is a three phase horizontal with weir. The slug is found before the weir.

My question, what methods are there to remove this sluge (chemical injection upstream, heating medium and others that exist) with minimal downtime in production and minimal effects for the downstream of the vessel in terms of water or oil quality. What have people heard being done before to do such tasks?

Regards.