Energy optimization of an FPSO operating in the Brazilian Pre-salt region

FPSO (Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading) units are used for primary petroleum processing. The FPSO units have a technical advantage for short-lived well exploration and for remote marginal fields, where building a pipeline is cost-prohibitive. Considering the relevance of the FPSOs for the Brazilian petroleum market, the main goal of this paper is to present an optimization procedure to find the best operating conditions of a primary petroleum platform processing crude oil with high gas-oil ratio (GOR) and moderate CO2 content. Seven input parameters related to operating pressures of plant are selected for the optimization procedure aiming to minimize the total fuel consumption (FUE) of the FPSO. For the optimization procedure, the processing plant of the FPSO is modeled and simulated by using Aspen HYSYS®, and the Genetic Algorithm is used for minimizing the objective function. The optimum operating condition found by the optimization procedure presented a reduction in fuel consumption by 4.6% when compared to a conventional operating condition. Moreover, because of the fuel consumption optimization, a significant reduction by 6.3% in the power consumption of the plant and an improvement in the recovery of the volatile components were verified, in comparison with the baseline case.