The influence of burial depth and soil thermal conductivity on heat transfer in buried CO2 pipelines for CCS: a parametric study

Olugunwa, Babafemi, Race, Julia and Tezdogan, Tahsin (2021) The influence of burial depth and soil thermal conductivity on heat transfer in buried CO2 pipelines for CCS: a parametric study. In Proceedings of the 2020 13th International Pipeline Conference. (doi:10.1115/IPC2020-9695).

Abstract

Pipeline heat transfer modelling of buried pipelines is integral to the design and operation of onshore pipelines to aid the reduction of flow assurance challenges such as carbon dioxide (CO2) gas hydrate formation during pipeline transportation of dense phase CO2 in carbon capture and storage (CCS) applications. In CO2 pipelines for CCS, there are still challenges and gaps in knowledge in the pipeline transportation of supercritical CO2 due to its unique thermo-physical properties as a single, dense phase liquid above its critical point. Although the design and operation of pipelines for bulk fluid transport is well established, the design stage is incomplete without the heat transfer calculations as part of the steady state hydraulic and flow assurance design stages. This paper investigates the steady state heat transfer in a buried onshore dense phase CO2 pipelines analytically using the conduction shape factor and thermal resistance method to evaluate for the heat loss from an uninsulated pipeline.
A parametric study that critically analyses the effect of variation in pipeline burial depth and soil thermal conductivity on the heat transfer rate, soil thermal resistance and the overall heat transfer coefficient (OHTC) is investigated. This is done using a one-dimensional heat conduction model at constant temperature of the dense phase CO2 fluid. The results presented show that the influence of soil thermal conductivity and pipeline burial depth on the rate of heat transfer, soil thermal resistance and OHTC is dependent on the average constant ambient temperature in buried dense phase CO2 onshore pipelines. Modelling results show that there are significant effects of the ambient natural convection on the soil temperature distribution which creates a thermal influence region in the soil along the pipeline that cannot be ignored in the steady state modelling and as such should be modelled as a conjugate heat transfer problem during pipeline design.

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Contributors

Author: Tahsin Tezdogan

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