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Comment by pravus

I'm not sure how much it would really be needed. Part of my family owned and operated a gas measurement business in West Texas and I don't recall ever having to do anything special for winter conditions on pipelines. Most of the water and oil comes out with the plunger lift in the well head and is stored on-site next to the well. Trucks come to haul it off and one of our jobs was to coordinate all of that plus maintenance.

There are glycol stations but as I recall those are really only used in gathering systems with a compressor. The large plants will have tons of equipment online to condition the gas before pushing it upstream. The biggest issue we ever had was just baby-sitting compressors in the middle of the night because some of them just really don't like to operate in cold conditions.

I used to test the gas in a lab and there wouldn't be enough water vapor left in the line to cause any issues under freezing. You have far more issues with carbon sludge build-up since anything above butane just really wants to be a liquid. That area typically produces wells with something like 4% N2, 70-80% C1, 2% CO2, and the rest is basically C2+ with maybe some H2S in a few places. It's very easy gas to pipe around for the most part.

parent pravus 2 years ago

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