In multilayered reservoirs, major focus has been on the usage of smart well completion technologies to help improve recoveries, particularly with technological improvements and an increasing expanse of opportunities in more challenging and rewarding assets. The fundamental focus has been to design well completions that integrate several surface/subsurface sub zones and automate the flow control from each zone. In Multi zone Smart Completion Wells where significant investment is made to complete smart wells with remotely controlled inflow control valves (ICV), reservoir sweep & drain accessibilities becomes decisive when evaluating the efficiency of recovery and long-term field development strategy. Smart completion designs for multi-lateral wells present many challenges in terms of completion deployment and interventions in life of well. The complexity of operations increases with deviation, type of completion equipment, number of zones and planned interventions. In offshore, UAE a similar multilateral well was designed to be completed with 4 zone smart completion and had a mandatory requirement of accessibility to lower most drain (for future interventions) with the ability to plug the lower drain till future requirements arises. A solution is to utilize nipple & blanking plug in lower most drain, which was implemented in this well. Upon successful deployment of completion, plug was retrieved on coil tubing and lower drain accessibility was confirmed. However, during re-installation of blanking plug on coil tubing in deviated section, issues were encountered to pass through the ICV profiles. In attempts to pass through ICV profiles, blanking plug and running tool got disconnected from coil tubing, leaving the fish inside one of ICV valve. Several attempts were made to retrieve the blanking plug with rig on coil tubing without success by using thru-tubing fishing equipment options available in country. Well was suspend to work-out fishing strategy & evaluate availability of fishing equipment worldwide. Consideration was done for design and manufacture application specific fishing tools to perform workover with barge for such smart completion, as it includes a number of downhole components that makes its retrieval more challenging, and there are no standard procedure or provision in place to retrieve such complex completions in highly deviated section. A barge was mobilized with coil tubing, which performed the fishing operation as planned. Careful selection of equipment's, BHA and operational parameters resulted in successful retrieval of blanking plug & running tools. Accessibility to well was gain and confirmed. This paper presents the situation that was faced, the remedial work done to complete well, fishing operations and the subsequent factors considered for choice of equipment and operation on well. This paper concludes a detailed account of factors to consider for planning smart completions in horizontal multilateral wells & the successful fishing operation – an excellent example of how careful planning, dedicated project management, specialized design fishing tools, experienced personnel and a collaborative relationship between team's leads to a successful operation and prevented an extremely expensive workover of a high technology completion well.
A large operator of a brown field offshore in the middle east has decided to provide full lower Completion accessibility and ensure prevention of open hole collapse as it can lead to various gains throughout the life of the well. Among those benefits, it provides a consolidated well bore for various production logging & stimulation tools to be deployed effectively, as well as full accessibility, conformance control and enable to provide production allocations for each zones. However there are multiple challenges in deploying lower completion liner in drains involving multiple reservoirs and geo steered wells: Well Bore Geometry, dog legs/ tortuosity etc. & differential sticking possibilities and of course the open hole friction. Due to the size of the open hole, restricted casing design and utilization of limited OD pipes further add to the complications of deploying the Lower completion liner in such brown Field wells. This paper intend to review the multi-step methodology approach implemented in recent years by the company to effectively deploy 4-1/2″ Liner in 6″ Horizontal Open Hole section. Among the techniques used to assist successful deployment of lower completions are: Improving hole cleaning, ensure smooth well bore with the use of directional drilling BHA, reduction of the Open Hole friction by utilizing Lubricated brines, fit for purpose Centralizers, use of drill pipe swivel devices to increase weight available to push the liner & reduce buckling tendency. With the length of open hole laterals reaching up to 10,000 ft for 6″ Lower drains, open hole drag, friction & cleanliness are major components that causes challenges in deploying the Liner till TD. The use of specially formulated brines with fixed percentage of lubricants proved to significant reduce friction compared to the drilling mud used for drilling the horizontal drain. The combination of low friction brine with proper centralization / standoff which resulted in reduced contact area with the formation has also shown good results in preventing differentials sticking while running the liner through multilayer reservoirs having significantly different reservoir pressures. Another major constrain to deploy the lower completion liner in this offshore field is the very nature of the wells being primarily workover. This involves generally Tie back liners run to shallow depths to restore the integrity of wells. This limits our ability in the selection of drill pipe that can be used as only smaller OD drill pipes and HWDP can be utilized in order to deploy the Liner to bottom. On many occasions this provides only limited weight to push the Liner down to TD and impact our ability to set the liner top packer. Drill pipe rotating swivel devices have been utilized to improve our weight availability & transferability to push the liner down and to set the liner top packers. In order to provide independent deactivation mechanism for the drill pipe swivel and to have complete success in our liner deployments, a dedicated ball activated sub was designed to deactivate the swivel acting as back up in case primary deactivation methods fails during liner setting. The combined use of all these techniques enabled the company to deploy 4.5″ Liners in 6″ Horizontal drains with high success in this offshore Brown Oil field of UAE. This resulted in better well construction and complete access to lower drains over the life of the wells.
A large operator of a brown field offshore in the middle east has decided to provide full lower Completion accessibility and ensure prevention of open hole collapse as it can lead to various gains throughout the life of the well. Among those benefits, it provides a consolidated well bore for various production logging & stimulation tools to be deployed effectively, as well as full accessibility, conformance control and enable to provide production allocations for each zones. However there are multiple challenges in deploying lower completion liner in drains involving multiple reservoirs and geo steered wells: Well Bore Geometry, dog legs/ tortuosity etc. & differential sticking possibilities and of course the open hole friction. Due to the size of the open hole, restricted casing design and utilization of limited OD pipes further add to the complications of deploying the Lower completion liner in such brown Field wells. This paper intend to review the multi-step methodology approach implemented in recent years by the company to effectively deploy 4-1/2" Liner in 6" Horizontal Open Hole section. Among the techniques used to assist successful deployment of lower completions are: Improving hole cleaning, ensure smooth well bore with the use of directional drilling BHA, reduction of the Open Hole friction by utilizing Lubricated brines, fit for purpose Centralizers, use of drill pipe swivel devices to increase weight available to push the liner & reduce buckling tendency. With the length of open hole laterals reaching up to 10,000 ft for 6" Lower drains, open hole drag, friction & cleanliness are major components that causes challenges in deploying the Liner till TD. The use of specially formulated brines with fixed percentage of lubricants proved to significant reduce friction compared to the drilling mud used for drilling the horizontal drain. The combination of low friction brine with proper centralization / standoff which resulted in reduced contact area with the formation has also shown good results in preventing differentials sticking while running the liner through multilayer reservoirs having significantly different reservoir pressures. Another major constrain to deploy the lower completion liner in this offshore field is the very nature of the wells being primarily workover. This involves generally Tie back liners run to shallow depths to restore the integrity of wells. This limits our ability in the selection of drill pipe that can be used as only smaller OD drill pipes and HWDP can be utilized in order to deploy the Liner to bottom. On many occasions this provides only limited weight to push the Liner down to TD and impact our ability to set the liner top packer. Drill pipe rotating swivel devices have been utilized to improve our weight availability & transferability to push the liner down and to set the liner top packers. In order to provide independent deactivation mechanism for the drill pipe swivel and to have complete success in our liner deployments, a dedicated ball activated sub was designed to deactivate the swivel acting as back up in case primary deactivation methods fails during liner setting. The combined use of all these techniques enabled the company to deploy 4.5" Liners in 6" Horizontal drains with high success in this offshore Brown Oil field of UAE. This resulted in better well construction and complete access to lower drains over the life of the wells.
In workover phase prior to commencing sidetrack operation, it is required to recover old existing completion string for isolating & abandoning existing reservoir section in accordance with well integrity and global well abandonment standards. Prior to utilization of the coiled tubing cementing approach, the practice was to recover all existing completion by cutting and pulling out the dual tubing or mill the permanent packer. After all the completion recovery, spot and squeeze cementing operations were conducted. However a major drawback of this process is, until recovering some part of completion string, the actual physical condition of the completion strings remains unknown and it poses high risk to get stuck in cased hole or end up in loosing accessibility inside completion string due to corrosion. Furthermore, in some of the old wells had failure to recover completion components like a dual flow assembly and a dual packer due to completion age, had led to improper zonal isolation. Even if all the old existing completion is recovered successfully, it consumes a lot of operation time and several fishing trips with overshot or junk mill BHA (Bottom Hole Assembly). In order to minimize the risk of being stuck or loosing accessibility and ending up failing to recover existing completion and to save operational time, the coiled tubing cementing was conducted to isolate existing reservoir and leave remaining parts of completion downhole. During the operation phase, injectivity test was performed by pumping sea water followed by bull heading kill fluid in to the reservoir. Losses rate was evaluated while observing the well, a high viscosity pill was spotted in order to treat losses and control loss rate. Coiled tubing was rigged up on Long string and run in hole to tag a landing nipple in existing completion string in order to have reference of depth corrected against ORTE (Original Rotary Table Elevation) depths while using the coiled tubing for operations. After having correct reference of depth with tagging completions nipple accessory, coiled tubing with slim OD cementing BHA was run in hole to tag PBTD (Plug Back Total Depth) and then picked up to certain depth while spotting cement slurry at controlled speed. Once the complete amount of slurry was spotted during picking up coiled tubing was pulled out to be away from cement slurry and then coiled tubing BOP (Blow Out Preventer) was closed and cement was squeezed in to the formation. After squeezing pre determined volume or archiving the lock up pressure, coiled tubing was pulled further up and circulated out to ensure all cement slurry out from coiled tubing (inside and outside). Top of cement was confirmed by tagging with the milling assembly connected to coiled tubing and the pressure test was performed after waiting on cement to confirm the integrity of the barrier. For short string, similar abandonment plug process was followed as that of the long string. After performing tagging operations, cement was spotted while pulling out the coil tubing to certain depth and then coil tubing was picked up above the cement to squeeze cement in to the formation. Similar coiled tubing cement operation for isolating lower perforations was performed on three other wells, and proper zonal isolation was achieved against reservoirs. This improved approach of abandoning lower reservoir prior to completions recovery proved to save 2-3 days of rig operational time in comparison to previous operations practices of recovering existing completion completely & then perform cementing operations for zonal isolation against each reservoir. Based on the successful result in three wells, it is concluded that this coiled tubing cement operation is effective for zonal isolation and provide savings in operation days.
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