Steam carries much more energy than water and is therefore much more efficient at transferring heat energy into the reservoir and producing heavy oil.

Modern steam-generating facilities are very efficient at producing steam but are often located many miles from the wellhead. Between the wellhead and the steam source, there can be miles of pipe, T junctions, varying gradients and geometry changes which may degrade the quality of the steam and thus reduce the efficiency of the recovery process. During pilot programs reservoir engineers need to be able to tell if the reservoir rocks are simply suboptimal for an expensive large scale steam flood program or if there is a fault somewhere in the pilot steam delivery process.

The Falcon SQuared2 system was specifically designed and manufactured in Oman to measure steam quality here in the Gulf region. Existing steam measurement quality technologies were designed with much lower injection rate wells in mind. Each SQuared2 system can cope with a 4000 bbl. per day throughput which is double what was previously available in the market. Uniquely we chose to use two small cyclonic separator vessels rather than a single large vessel as the heart of the process.

There are several advantages to using two vessels

• Greater redundancy: Our remote operating environment dictates that we engineer reliability and redundancy into all of our equipment.
• Better range of measurement: A large vessel works well at higher injection rates but perform poorly at lower rates giving lower accuracy. Two smaller vessels can be run in parallel at high rates and gives the same level of accuracy as a large single vessel. However, at lower injection rates, one of the separator vessels can be taken offline whilst the remaining vessel continues to offer a high level of measurement accuracy and measurement reliability as it perform under optimal load.

At rates above 4000 Bbl/d, individual skids can be run in parallel. As well as the core steam quality output from the Coriolis meter, we have designed in an additional quality check in the form of a total dissolved solids (TDS) measurement. This measurement can be used to confirm the output of the Coriolis meter at times when serious departures from the expected measurement are observed.

The skid is solar-powered and uses GSM technology to transmit real-time data directly to the engineering office.