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By Mark Plummer MSc BEng

In March, 2017 ISO released their Latest Well Integrity Standard, ISO 16530-1: Life Cycle Governance. In this article I will provide the background to the standard and discuss some of the key sections contained within.

BACKGROUND TO ISO 16530-1

1. 1. It was developed by producing operating companies for oil and gas, and is intended for use in the petroleum and natural gas industry worldwide

2. 2. It is intended to provide guidance to the Well Operator on managing well integrity throughout the well life cycle. Furthermore, it addresses the minimum compliance requirements for the well operator to claim conformity with ISO 16530-1

3. 3. It provides recommendations and techniques that well operators can apply in a scalable manner, based on a well’s specific risk characteristics

4. 4. ISO 16530-1 is intended to compliment the 2014 issued ISO 16530-2 Technical Standard (TS) – Well Integrity for the Operational Phase, which is intended to provide the requirements to manage Well Integrity during the operation (production) phase only.

5. 5. The standard is not applicable to:

• • Well control activities implemented to prevent or mitigate unintentional release of formation fluids from the well to its surroundings.
  • Wellbore integrity, sometimes referred to as “borehole stability”

KEY SECTIONS OF ISO 16530-1

All well life cycle phases have common elements, methods and processes, which are integral to well integrity management. ISO 16530-1 identifies and discusses key considerations for 12 common elements, as detailed in the figure above.

Assuring well integrity comprises two main building blocks: the first is to ensure well integrity during well design and construction, and the second is to manage well integrity throughout the remaining well life thereafter ISO 16530-1 addresses the six phases of the well life cycle, and their interrelationships, as illustrated above.

An interview with Erik Dietrichson, Manager – Eastern Region Well Intervention Service, FMC Technologies

Perspectives and development of the RLWI business

Riserless Light Well Intervention or RLWI – is the term used to describe the method for performing inspection and maintenance of subsea wells from a monohull vessel by sluicing a toolstring suspended in a wireline into the subsea well under full pressure, but without using a high pressure riser. RLWI is a cost efficient method as it can be performed from monohull vessels rather than costly drilling rigs. Wireline operations are used to perform production logging by measuring the locations of liquid in-flow and water content, to install a plug to isolate intervals with high inflow of reservoir water and to re-perforate the well casing by use of explosives to establish a new production interval at a higher level. It is also possible to increase the production rate from a well by removing scale growth that will reduce the well’s flow area. Another routine operation is to install a so-called insert-down-hole-safety-valve, to replace the function of the initially installed safety valve.

Fishing is often a complex operation that can require more than a single run due to partial recovery of the fish or discovery of unexpected conditions.

This month’s video is a succession of clips recorded with EV’s Slickline Memory camera where a customer in South East Asia progressed through their recovery operation, progressively understanding the exact conditions throughout the different stages.

No special preparation was required as the jobs were run in a dry gas environment.

After a first run that accurately identified the top of wire, a wire cutter was run in hole and held up at an unexpected depth. The pin had to be sheared to release the cutter and the next camera run identified a slickline bird nest.

With this information, a significant amount of slickline was recovered and another camera was run to assess the results. The new top of fish, a slickline fishing head is clearly seen, followed by the top of a sidewall cutter.

After latching onto the sidewall cutter, another camera is run. This time, the sidewall cutter is found centred, which allowed the correct selection of fishing tools.

On recovering the sidewall cutter, another camera was run to check the condition of the wire below it. The last segment of video shows yet another slickline bird nest.

After multiple runs and several days, the customer successfully concluded the operation relying throughout on EV’s Slickline Memory Camera, a battery powered optical camera that records up to 5 hours of HD colour video images at 30 frames per second. Acquisition, as in this case, can be continuous; however the tools can also be programmed to record as many as 60 segments, an efficient and cost effective solution to diagnosing complex or changing downhole conditions over an extended period of time.

See the successful deployment of the TRIDENT® System, which performed two cuts and recovered casing to surface in a single trip.

Understand what the new regulatory updates mean for those involved in Gulf of Mexico well intervention and hear BSEE’s comments relating to both riserless well intervention systems and BSEE’s final rule.

Offshore Network have created a forecast of the well intervention service demand in the Eagle Ford and Permian basins. The whitepaper highlights the likely path of the oil price throughout 2018 and the correlating well services which will be in demand.

As developed wells continue to produce, these completed assets undergo thermodynamic cycling consistent with the production life of the well. The constant loading on these wells induce stresses that are ultimately transmitted to the annular cement sheaths that were intended to provide isolation of formation fluids from the surface. If these cementitious barriers become compromised, integrity issues proliferate and transmit downhole pressures to the surface. These problems are exasperated if the primary cement job was compromised during initial placement due to such complications as losses. Channels and micro-annular leak paths are responsible for these phenomena of observed pressure at the surface.

To remediate these integrity challenges, the unconventional application of resins has proven to be a cost-effective solution for the restoration of isolation. With over 141 successful interventions to date, Wellcem has developed a series of standard operating procedures that help ensure successful remediation of these challenges. Implementation of five critical measures during job execution can assist in the satisfactory sealing of these communicatory pathways.

Read more: Effective alternatives to cement in oil and gas wells

1. 1. Ensure proper functionality of wellhead gate valves
      Pre-job pressure testing should always incorporate verification of all wellhead valves across which annular treatment will ensue. A leaking gate valve can introduce a myriad of problems during initial injection as well as unwanted displacement by annular fluids during the setting of the annular plug.
   2. Injectivity analysis and annular pressure diagnostics should be performed separately and ahead of the scheduled Thermaset® treatment
      Before treatment, a mandatory injection test is performed to verify the communicatory pathway across which Thermaset® can be injected. Water is often the fluid of choice during this analysis, as its Newtonian profile closely models the rheology and fluid dynamics of Thermaset®. It is during these tests that injected water can occupy the void spaces of the compromised cement sheath and fill porosity – potentially preventing their future displacement. This can ultimately heightened circulating pressures required to displace water from these voids with resin. Should such pressures exceed the collapse and burst pressures of downhole tubulars, or the maximum operating pressure of surface equipment, insufficient injection of resin will occur. Therefor, such diagnostics should therefore not be performed in tandem with the remedial operation and executed before treatment to allow evacuation of these voids.
      Read more: Resin curing process
      
   3. During annular diagnostics, every annulus should be monitored for any potential pressure response at the surface
      Well Integrity issues are often non-singular and can manifest themselves as multiple downhole challenges. In some instances, an observed surface pressure is a result of communication from one annulus to another via a shallow casing leak. These leaks often result from galvanic corrosion or oxidation of tubulars. Identifying a shallow communicatory leak from one annulus to the other facilitates complete and successful remediation of the sustained annular pressure on the affected asset. If a shallow leak is initially identified, it should be secured before isolating the source of produced fluids. Sealing the casing leak helps to prevent unwanted displacement of large and wasted volumes of resin into the tubular leak path in an attempt to seal the source. With proper volumetric displacement, the casing leak is solved first, and then the channel or micro-annuli responsible for pressure transmission can be properly sealed.
      
      
   4. Always remediate sustained casing pressure from inner annuli outwards.
      When sustained casing pressure is verified in multiple annuli and are not interconnected, they should be treated from the inner annulus outwards. In other words, if there exists sustained annular pressure on annuli A, B, and C, treatment should first start with annulus A, before progressing to annulus B, and finally conclude with the remediation of the C annulus. This procedure should be employed if tubular integrity is verified and no communication across each annulus has been confirmed. The justification for this methodology is substantiated through the treatment pressures applied to each annulus. As remediation progresses concentrically outwards, the applied treatment pressures and pressure ratings of each casing decreases. Therefore, the pressure that can be applied to the A-annulus will be higher than treatment pressures on the B and C annulus. Once A annular integrity has been restored, the B-annulus will be treated at a lower pressure that will have less influence on the A annulus that was cured first. The lower pressure applied to the B annulus will be less than the pressure that was applied to the A annulus and therefore have less of a chance of disturbing the remediated A. Where execution to progress from outer annuli inwards, the elevated treatment pressures of inner annuli can potentially lead to ballooning of tubulars that can disturb the outer annuli that were treated at lower pressure.
      
      
   5. Pneumatic driven liquid pumps are preferred over high pressure triplex pumps
      Annular leak paths are often geometrically tortuous with limited permeability and minimal volumetric porosity. Thus, the volume required to fill such voids is significantly small. Triplex pumps of assorted plunger diameters result in large displacement volumes at varied rates. These large displacement volumes coupled with high operational pressure capabilities are not preferred, as they can often further compromise the integrity of the damaged annular sheath. Alternatively, small displacement pumps, such as Haskel pumps, are ideal for such applications due to their small displacement volumes and relatively high operating pressures. These pumps efficiently convert compressed air into hydraulic power and are capable of holding a set pressure for a sustained period as is required in these remedial applications.
      As completion of assets with cement continues to be the primary mode of isolation and as wells continue to undergo cyclic stresses attributed to production, annular integrity challenges will continue to manifest themselves. Implementation of such guidelines can help ensure successful remediation of sustained casing pressure /annular pressure on these affected assets through the introduction of this unconventional, rig-less, and cost-effective strategy.

This article was published by Sean Francis and Mohamed Aly Tawfik of Wellcem

Sean has worked as a field engineer in the US and Gulf of Mexico as well as the Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian sectors of the North Sea, and across the middle east in the U.A.E., Oman, and Saudi Arabia. He currently serves as Project Manager of the Middle East for Wellcem. Mohamed Aly Tawfik has been with Wellcem since 2012 working in Saudi Arabia with lost circulation plugs, squeezes and casing to casing leaks. He is now Operations Coordinator at Wellcem.

This article was sourced from Wellcem: https://blog.wellcem.com/5-keys-to-the-successful-remediation-of-sustained-annular-pressure

For more information from Wellcem you can see their blog here: https://blog.wellcem.com

In pursuit of a safer and more cost-effective best practice approach to liquid-based rigless/riserless interventions, the oil and gas industry is engaged in a growing movement to identify new techniques and technologies that can help it to maximize revenues from existing brownfields and new assets by enhancing their output.

For this particular project, EV engineered a simple gas detection indicator, mounted in front of the Optis HD E-line downview camera, to reveal the presence of low-rate gas entry in a gas-filled environment. Under these conditions, conventional technologies fail to detect small gas entries making it impossible for operators to understand and optimise the performance of their wells.

This document can act as starting point for people who want to learn more about composite pipes in offshore applications, and is intended for engineers, Technical Authorities and managers active in the SURF, Subsea Intervention, Drilling and other related fields of activity.