Reducing flaring during well testing in a high-H₂S gas condensate reservoir

Task

A gas condensate appraisal well in a remote field required a comprehensive well-testing programme including flowback clean-up, multi-rate testing, pressure build-up analysis, production logging and fluid sampling. Under conventional practice, produced hydrocarbons, gas and condensate, would be flared because of the absence of pipeline infrastructure and the instability of the produced fluids. The operator aimed to minimise flaring and recover produced condensate while maintaining safe and stable testing operations.

However, the unstable condensate contained significant dissolved gas, making transport or storage without stabilisation unsafe, and conventional liquid transfer pumps were unsuitable at high gas volume fractions (GVF) because of gas locking and operational shutdowns. Traditional options — condensate stabilisation columns or storage tanks with heaters to 120 °C — were ruled out due to high cost, diesel intensity, and HSE risks. A reliable solution was required to transfer multiphase fluids safely while maintaining stable well-testing operations.

Solution

ABSS integrated BoostFlow into the well-testing spread. The multiphase pump was installed upstream of the transfer pipeline to boost the pressure of produced fluids and enable continuous export of unstable condensate to a remote processing facility through a temporary pipeline. BoostFlow pumped through gas volume fractions from 0% to 100%, operating reliably through the highly transient flowback and clean-up conditions typical of well testing.

The spread included standard pressure-control equipment, choke manifolds, indirect heaters and a three-phase separator. Downstream of the separator, unstable condensate was routed through BoostFlow and pumped through a temporary 3 km pipeline to the central processing facility, allowing testing to proceed normally while flaring was significantly reduced and valuable hydrocarbons were recovered rather than burned.

Result

The integrated BoostFlow deployment enabled a low-flaring well-testing operation while maintaining stable multiphase transfer under highly dynamic flow conditions. Key results included:

• Continuous multiphase pumping under GVF conditions ranging from 0% to 100%
• Sustained operation at 96–100% GVF for more than 24 hours without recirculation systems and without gas lock
• Stable pumping performance despite rapidly changing flow regimes during flowback
• 9,400 barrels of unstable condensate recovered and transferred to the central facility instead of being flared
• Pressure boosted from 0.2 barg to 40 barg
• Completion of all well-testing objectives including multi-rate testing, PLT logging and fluid sampling
• Zero incidents, zero NPT

BoostFlow demonstrated high operational stability and reliability in sour gas conditions and in the transient flow regimes typical of well-testing operations. The deployment proves that low-emission well testing is technically feasible even in remote sour gas fields, providing operators with a practical pathway to align well testing with modern ESG and emissions-reduction targets. The results were published at the SPE Caspian Technical Conference, Baku 2025 (SPE-230467-MS).