Design of a hypothetical relief well for a shallow reservoir, possible challenges.

Master's thesis in Petroleum engineering. Blowouts are one of the biggest threats during exploration and production of oil and gas. Losing control of a well can lead to severe consequences both economically, environmentally and put the working crew in danger. There are several blowout contingen...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ralowski, Mikolaj
Format: Master Thesis
Language:English
Published: University of Stavanger, Norway 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2409333
Description
Summary:Master's thesis in Petroleum engineering. Blowouts are one of the biggest threats during exploration and production of oil and gas. Losing control of a well can lead to severe consequences both economically, environmentally and put the working crew in danger. There are several blowout contingency methods which allow to regain control of the well. Last resort method is to drill one or more relief wells, intersect with the blowing well and perform a dynamic kill procedure. While relief well drilling and killing a blowing well through it is a quite well-developed concept, there are some scenarios that require a different approach. Such scenario would be when the reservoir lays very shallow below the seabed. In that case, regardless whether it is an appraisal well or producer that gets the blowout, it cannot be killed through a relief well of usual S-shaped trajectory because the depth is too small to drill such well. Such situation requires a novel relief well design approach and needs to be addressed. In this Thesis, a real-life shallow reservoir scenario located on a Barents Sea has been presented and carefully evaluated. For this scenario, 2 relief well surface locations have been chosen and a novel, Ushaped relief well trajectory has been proposed. The trajectory has been calculated and the entire situation has been presented in modelling software such as 3Ddrill and Landmark COMPASS. Later, casing design for the relief well has been proposed based on already existing concept of a horizontal well designed for this particular location. Possible challenges associated with such relief well trajectory design have been presented and discussed. The U-shaped relief well will suffer from several obstacles that would need to be overcome, such as difficulties in cuttings transport or reduced Weight on Bit due to well friction and high well inclination. As the process of localizing, tracking and intersection will differ strongly from the typical approach in S-shaped relief wells, potential challenges will also may occur ...