Cold Creek Pigging Simulator · Browser
Find out what the line does before it does it to you.
A pigging simulator for natural gas gathering lines. Pad to pad, home run to the compressor station, station to the plant. Watch liquids collect in the low spots, judge whether a pig will make it, and work a stuck pig in the order it is actually worked.
Accounts are approved by hand · no installation
For evaluation and practice. Not a working tool. Try it, learn from it, judge whether it is worth having. Do not run a job off it. Pressure figures are simplified estimates, the physics is illustrative rather than calibrated, and nothing it exports is a record. The supplemental terms say so in more detail, and they mean it.
The part that is hard to teach
Pigging is mostly uneventful until it is not, and the day it is not is a bad day to be learning. A pig that will not move is a judgment call made under pressure, with a control room on the phone, and the wrong sequence hurts people.
You cannot practice that on a live line. This is somewhere to make the call, watch what happens, and make it again.
In the simulator
Built on how the work actually goes
Ninety-nine of a hundred pigs are pushing liquids
Not debris. Runs are daily, to knock hydrates out and move liquids down to the station and plant to be stabilized. The model is built around that, because that is the job.
The escalation, in order
Build back pressure. Send another pig, which is standard practice and not a last resort. Still stuck means a hydrate, and then you blow down equally on both sides. Unequal, and a hydrate that cuts loose will kill someone.
Real gathering topology
Well pad to pad pushing a pad into the main line, laterals into a home run, home run to the compressor station, station to the plant. Field launches most pigs. The plant is mostly the receiving end.
Pressures that match the field
A pad sits at 20 to 80 psi, a compressor station at 600 to 800, and you lose 100 to 200 into the plant. The presets start there rather than at a round number.
Who it is for
- Operators newer to gathering. The line is the teacher. Send a pig, watch where the liquid goes, find out what a sag does to it without a truck roll.
- Anyone training a crew. A place to argue about a stuck pig where the wrong answer costs nothing. The escalation is the part people get wrong.
- Teams evaluating simulation. Look at it before deciding whether this kind of tool is worth having. That is what it is for right now.
What it is not for
- Planning, scheduling or justifying a real pig run.
- Setting a test pressure, or deciding whether to repair or defer.
- Satisfying Operator Qualification, PSM or RMP requirements.
- Producing a record. Nothing it exports is one.
The engineering shown is a worked example of a published method applied to a line you made up. Design pressure is not MAOP, which under 49 CFR 192.619 is the lowest of design pressure, test-pressure history and prior operating pressure; this computes the first of those and says so on screen. Remaining strength is a B31G worked example, not a fitness-for-service determination. Where a coefficient came from published work the repository names the source, and where it did not, the repository says that too.
Built by someone who ran the lines
Five years in the field and ten in the plant, and it is the field half that this one comes from. Gathering is where the pigs actually run; the plant is mostly the receiving end. The daily runs, the liquids, the hydrate that will not move, and the blowdown rule that exists because the alternative kills somebody came from doing it, not from a textbook.
Tell us who you are and what you would use it for. We read them.