Pluspetrol Corporation’s “Camisea Upstream Facilities Project” is located in the Perúvian rainforest, east of the Andes Mountains. The remote Camisea project—a cornerstone of Peru’s economic development plan—has presented several engineering, environmental, and logistical challenges to the project team as it strives to develop safe, reliable operating facilities for the people of Peru, with minimum disruption to the environmentally sensitive region, and to the indigenous tribes along the Urubamba and Camisea Rivers.

The project involves gathering of gas and condensate from two fields in the remote jungle, and transporting them to a new-build liquid separation/NGL recovery/gas compression plant at Malvinas, still in the jungle. A new pipeline will carry the NGL’s over the Andes Mountains more than 500 Km to a new-build gas fractionation plant on the Pacific coast. A separate pipeline will be used to transport Sales Gas on into Lima, Peru. Fractionated C3, C4, naphtha, and diesel products will be loaded onto ships from a marine terminal for sale on the international and domestic markets.

Camisea is described as equivalent to an offshore subsea development, even though it is 500 Km from the coast. And, as with many offshore deepwater projects, “flow assurance” is a key parameter for the Camisea Project. Flow assurance parameters were a significant design parameter in the remote gas gathering system, for transportation over the 15,000 ft elevation change in the NGL pipeline – up and down the Andes, as well as the subsea pipelines for loading refrigerated products at temperatures of – 45 F. Learn also how flow assurance issues impacted plant site selections, both in the remote jungle and along the coast.