Technology collaboration key in well intervention today

Dec. 17, 2007
The frontier of coiled tubing-related technology in the well intervention business is shown being tested in the Last Frontier state as Western Well Tool loads its drilling tractor into a well at the site of the Nordic Rig No.
The frontier of coiled tubing-related technology in the well intervention business is shown being tested in the Last Frontier state as Western Well Tool loads its drilling tractor into a well at the site of the Nordic Rig No. 2 at Prudhoe Bay oil fi eld on Alaska’s North Slope. The company contends that, with the aid of advanced drilling tractors, coiled tubing use will grow as industry drills more extreme-profi le wells.
Photo courtesy of Western Well Tool.
Click here to enlarge image

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There are many daunting technology challenges for service and supply companies in the well intervention business today.

But the biggest challenge of all may be in these companies’ ability to enhance collaboration with operating companies on new technology at a time of high costs for equipment and services.

“Technology is the key to tomorrow’s production,” notes Mark McGurk, product line director, Baker Oil Tools. “Service companies like Baker Oil Tools are working in partnership with operating companies to develop pragmatic, technology-based solutions designed to banish uncertainty, manage operational risk, and minimize NPT [nonproductive time].

“The industry needs to overcome its risk-averse culture to accept technology advancements that will provide the incremental growth in production that is needed to support the world’s continuing need for energy.”

One development that Blake Hammond, global product line manager for Weatherford International Ltd.’s Thru-Tubing division, finds encouraging in this and other technical challenges is that “the industry as a whole is more cognizant today of these challenges, and an atmosphere of collaborative endeavor is developing between operating and service companies to address them.

“As a result, the economics of any technical solution is more carefully evaluated, and resulting solutions will be more economically viable.”

Technical challenges

Regarding specifi c technical challenges in well intervention, Mc-Gurk says the technical objective is “holistic, all-encompassing system solutions that eliminate discrete steps and save days of rig time, increasing the value to the operating company.

“The importance of real-time information systems and smart intervention to achieve this objective cannot be underestimated— nor can improved technologies for deepwater service and isolation systems, composite tools that add value by their quick removal, V0-rated systems, and metal-to-metal sealing.”

Ever-increasing water depths, harsh downhole environments, and the proliferation of exotic well profi les pose the biggest technology hurdles for the well intervention sector.

The most daunting technical challenge for today’s well intervention operations is actually twofold, according to McGurk: “First, we must meet the performance requirements imposed by deepwater, hostile environments and extreme well profi les. The second part of the challenge involves working within the limitations of the exotic materials required to operate in these environments.”

In many situations, developments in new well profi les and exotic completion components have outpaced the capabilities of existing wellbore intervention equipment, McGurk contends.

“For example, in ultradeep, high-angle wells, surface measurements of hook-load, torque, etc., no longer provide suffi - ciently accurate assessments of tool performance at the bottom of the hole,” he says. “To achieve the level of performance that today’s hostile operating environments demand, well teams need to have a better understanding of what is happening at the ‘business end’ of [bottomhole assemblies] and downhole tools during the intervention operation.”

Bruce Moore, director of engineering for Western Well Tool Inc., thinks that the greatest well intervention challenge today is the same as it has been for years: how to get further down the hole in extended-reach (ER) wells.

“With high rotary rig rates, an increasing number of tasks are being allocated to coiled tubing rigs that can offer substantial cost savings and better availability. The depth that can be reached in either cased or barefoot ER wells can be increased by friction- reducing fl uids and larger-diameter pipe, but in an increasing number of cases these methods are still insuffi cient to reach bottom, pointing to the need for new technology such as Western Well Tool’s Intervention Tractors for coiled tubing.”

For Knight Oil Tools Pres. Mark Knight, the most daunting technical challenge specifi c to fi shing and plugging and abandonment (P&A) services would be developing an accurate plan of action that is adaptable to circumstances encountered in today’s more complex well environments. “Increased downhole pressures and temperatures, deepwater, complex completions, horizontal wells, and environmental considerations require that the plan be adaptable to revisions as operations progress,” he points out. “Every plan and revision must include economic considerations with the everincreasing cost of doing business.”

Hammond contends that the technology strides that have been made in the intervention business have in many respects outstripped the service companies’ ability to effectively communicate those improvements to their customers.

“We’re programmed in many respects to tout the virtues of the latest ‘widget,’ as opposed to educating our clients as to how we can use those developments to solve problems,” he says. “As we see a transformation, not only on the service side of the business but in our industry as a whole, we have to more effectively communicate with our clients the value of these developments. What each of these tools does independently of the others is irrelevant; what matters are the problems we can solve by screwing them together in various ways and creating the system that solves our client’s problem.”

McGurk believes that well service companies today “are doing a much better job than in the past of working with our operating company clients to understand their requirements and produce high-reliability, high-performance solutions to reduce uncertainty, manage risk, and drive down NPT and overall costs.

“Improved communication, combined with advanced planning and modeling tools, has helped service company/operator relationships evolve into partnerships with both parties working together to meet objectives.”

Coiled tubing

Coiled tubing (CT) will play an expanding role in well intervention services as technology improvements have made this versatile tool even more ubiquitous.

“Over the next 5 years, there will be an increasing demand for coiled tubing services to perform a wide variety of tasks, including sand control, water injection, acidizing, setting plugs, and logging,” says Moore.

However, as many CT operators are now at their limit of depth that can be reached with existing technology, new CT tractor technology will have an increasing impact, facilitating reaching targets that are unachievable otherwise, he contends.

“As operators become increasingly familiar with the use of CT tractors, broader applications will become more commonplace, including CT drilling with tractors into re-entry wells,” Moore says.

HTHP wells

As industry presses the search for deep gas and thus must contend with hotter and higher-pressure environments in high-temperature/high-pressure (HTHP) wells, “motor reliability will be of paramount importance,” says Hammond. “And the key to their improved performance is the development of the next generation of elastomers to work effectively in the ever more exacting conditions that we anticipate.”

McGurk cites high-temperature motor systems, sealing element systems, metal-to-metal sealing technologies, setting tools, and isolation tools as the key areas for breakthroughs in tackling HTHP wells.

Over/underbalanced wells

Industry is making big strides in overcoming the problem of massive formation damage with overbalanced drilling. At the same time, the formation damage that already exists poses a strong business opportunity for well intervention specialists.

“Underbalanced completions were the reason that I got into the well testing business,” says Mike Mayer, president of Well Testing Inc., a division of Oil States International. “The ability to drill a new or depleted zone without damaging the formation should be a huge improvement and help producers fi nd and bring to the surface new and bypassed reserves.”

Mayer adds, “The ability to make a decision while the well/zone is being drilled via ‘real-time testing’ can help the producer evaluate early and reduce the time required to make the go/no go decision.”

Hammond contends that as the use of underbalanced methods of drilling continue to gain acceptance, “so the days of massive formation damage will slowly come to an end and perhaps overbalanced drilling will go the way of the dinosaur.

“We have seen a major increase in the use of nitrogen as a portion of the drive fluids in milling and other operations, with the objective of protecting the formation, and it is clear that management of the formation from the beginning is now a priority with reservoir considerations overriding drilling needs.

“The problem is that there are huge quantities of wells still producing that have major damage inhibiting their productive capacity, and we feel that there is a great potential to address this and make improvements using well intervention techniques.”

One such approach is the concept of underbalanced underreaming of open-hole sections to attempt to clean up near-wellbore damage, Hammond notes.

Frac jobs

Improving fracturing techniques has and will continue to make unconventional plays practical, contends Mayer.

Hammond points out that there are many wells completed with multiple perforations for which stimulation is a continuing problem.

“Diverter systems to try to channel the stimulant to the less productive perforations can be ineffective, and so production potential remains untapped,” he points out. “A through-tubing and monobore straddle system has been developed that can be accurately placed in the well via coiled tubing or jointed pipe, which offers the potential to selectively treat specifi c sets of perforations.

“Initial trials of this system have proved very successful, and we feel that pinpoint stimulation may well become a very effective and effi cient stimulation technique in the near future.”

The same system can be applied to other stimulation techniques, Hammond adds.

Slickline services

Slickline intervention is a “huge” market for development, says McGurk, with well intervention specialists moving many traditional pipe-conveyed intervention technologies to slickline, particularly the setting of solid and infl atable plugging and isolation devices.

“The environmental benefi ts are signifi cant—replacing explosive setting tools and reducing the need to ship explosives, particularly in areas of higher political risk and times of increasing regulation,” he says.

In areas where the use of slickline intervention is mandated—due to platform structure weakness such as in the swamps of the Nigerian delta or in jungle and desert locations where mobilization is an economic issue, the running of certain tools such as packers and bridge plugs can be limited by the requirement for an explosive charge, Hammond notes.

“The development of the ‘Slickpump’—essentially a slicklineoperated hydraulic setting mechanism to perform the function of a power charge ignition system—has made slickline intervention more versatile,” he says. “This system can be used instead of electric line units or coiled tubing to set packers, plugs, and straddles, making such interventions more economically justifi able.”

Fishing

Good data are the key to improving fi shing operations, not just the surface indications but also the downhole measurements that are going to become available in the near future with the development of wellbore data gathering systems, according to Hammond.

“Fishing today is still a black art, and any 10 fi shing experts will have a total of 10 ways to do a given job—it’s the nature of the beast,” he says. “We believe that with better and more readily available data on past fi shing problems, we may see the day when those same 10 experts will have only four or fi ve suggested approaches. That would represent a quantum leap in fi shing job evaluation: It’s fi shing smarter.”

McGurk cites these breakthroughs in fi shing techniques:

  • Smart Intervention with the Sentio tool.
  • Advanced cutting and milling technologies.
  • Innovative new casing exit technologies that are far removed from traditional methodologies.

    Wellbore data

    The industry continues to push the envelope on gathering wellbore data in real time, and that is advancing well intervention technology as well.

    “The opportunities afforded by Smart Intervention technologies are tremendous,” says McGurk. “Smart Intervention integrates real-time bottomhole tool optimization data into well intervention to provide a new level of process control with real-time decision-making capabilities during well intervention work.”

    The Sentio tool contains an array of sensors that simultaneously sample downhole measurements of weight or tension on tool, torque, RPM, bending stress, vibration, and pressure at a high data rate. A digital signal processor analyzes the data stream and provides static parameters and diagnostics.

    “This information can be transmitted to a rig-fl oor monitor and a remote real-time operating center,” notes McGurk. “It also can be recorded in onboard memory and stored, then retrieved later at surface for detailed evaluation. By enabling well teams to have a better understanding of what is happening at the ‘business end’ of BHAs [bottomhole assemblies] and downhole tools during an intervention operation, Smart Intervention technology can lead to more-effi cient and reliable well intervention and signifiantly reduce operators’ risk exposure.”

    Well testing

    The advent of real-time wellbore data is changing the game in well testing as well.

    With some exceptions, how a well fl ows initially can impact the long-term production capacity of the well, Mayer points out.

    “Proper initial fl ow can prevent irreversible damage to the wellbore and reservoir,” he says. “Careful attention to well data as it occurs in real time can be helpful in making the decisions about fl owing the well.

    “Technology improvements in data acquisition systems that can communicate accurate, real-time well data from remote locations is becoming more useful as reservoirs deplete and well control becomes more vital to the success of a project. Information and communication technologies will continue to influence well testing.”

    As the industry workforce becomes more technologically proficient, the implementation and utilization of such technology becomes more feasible, Mayer notes.

    “ At the end of the day, all the technology in the world will not help unless the tester on location understands the information provided by the well itself,” he cautions. “Each well is different and should be treated as such.” ]

    Click here to enlarge image

    “The industry needs to overcome its risk-averse culture to accept technology advancements that will provide the incremental growth in production that is needed to support the world’s continuing need for energy.”
    — Mark McGurk, Baker Oil Tools

    Click here to enlarge image

    “We’re programmed in many respects to tout the virtues of the latest ‘widget,’ as opposed to educating our clients as to how we can use those developments to solve problems.”
    — Blake Hammond, Weatherford International

    Click here to enlarge image

    “The most daunting technical challenge specific to fi shing and P&A services would be developing an accurate plan of action that is adaptable to circumstances encountered in today’s more complex well environments.”
    — Mark Knight, Knight Oil Tools

    Click here to enlarge image

    “Over the next 5 years, there will be an increasing demand for coiled tubing services to perform a wide variety of tasks, including sand control, water injection, acidizing, setting plugs, and logging.”
    — Bruce Moore, Western Well Tool

    Click here to enlarge image

    “At the end of the day, all the technology in the world will not help unless the tester on location understands the information provided by the well itself. Each well is different and should be treated as such.”
    — Mike Mayer, Well Testing Inc.