Hydrate and paraffin formation, which blocks pipelines, may be today's largest risk factor holding up development of cold, deepwater reserves.

Once flow stops under cold water in the deep ocean, it can be difficult if not impossible to get it moving again.
Often blockages are inaccessible to chemical or mechanical removal. Removal of a section of the pipeline - or even pipeline abandonment - can be required. But regulations require that even an abandoned pipeline must be cleaned.
It is nearly impossible just to find the blockage. There is really no good way to traverse a subsea pipeline from outside and sense internal temperature or density differences caused by wax.
All of these things, of course, are being researched somewhere, and a breakthrough could always come tomorrow. Inside intervention - tractors, wireline or coiled tubing devices - might come to something, but the technology is not there yet.
There is, however, an intriguing alternative to trying to figure out a way to deal with hydrates. Basically, it's "Don't over analyze it. Do something." And it's one approach being taken by Benton Baugh, president of Radoil Inc. and co-owner of Subsea Pipeline Services LLC.
Baugh's reasoning goes something like this: Don't bother trying to find the hydrate blockage in a pipeline. Find it by eliminating it.
He's a gifted inventor with 72 patents to his credit, including the gimbaled J-Lay towers that recently installed pipelines offshore Brazil and Africa. Baugh said there are engineering problems in which it is better to build something, try it, break it and then analyze and optimize it. It can be far less costly, and often this process can generate answers that time-consuming theorizing and designing might never turn up.
Baugh's company built the 900ft-long test loop for the Deepstar blockage remediation project and now has it available for anyone researching hydrate and wax problems or any other flowline question. He intends to use it to test the subsea thermal operating module (SSTOM).
The SSTOM is a heat exchanger that pumps 180° water in a loop through a hemicylindrical chamber that rides the top of the pipeline. When the SSTOM passes over the blockage, it heats the pipe enough to eliminate it. Using the loop, Baugh is testing this concept.
What if it doesn't work? Well, Baugh will have found that out at probably the lowest possible cost. Anyway, that would make way for several other tools in his blockage-fighting lineup. See the Radoil Web site at www.radoilinc.com.

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