plugging and abandonment

When a new horizontal well in Asia was incapable of unassisted flow, coiled tubing (CT) was selected for the perforation and stimulation intervention. Mechanical isolation was required to ensure that the stimulation fluids entered only the new zones.

With no money to be made, P&A is one area where operators can put aside their hyper-competitiveness to work together. Members of the recently formed PACE network discussed the virtues of collaboration at the Decommissioning and Abandonment Summit 2018.

The shutting in of unprofitable offshore wells and the requirements for their plugging and abandonment is attracting more attention to what is being done with the associated subsea equipment. The benefits of leaving subsea systems in place vs. recovering them are being considered.

Archer’s Stronghold Barricade well decommissioning system leaves the casing in place, while perforating, washing, and cementing the annulus to create a cement barrier in a single trip.

A new downhole-tool-based abandonment system was developed and deployed successfully on four wells for a major operator on a field in the North Sea.

The complete paper describes how various P&A designs can be compared by use of a risk methodology that takes account of degradation mechanisms, potential flow rates, and the effect on the environment.

This paper presents full-scale tests that show it is possible to obtain good cement placement when the tubing is left in the hole.

As the boom of the 1970s and 1980s makes way for the first tranche of major decommissioning projects, the market for abandonment and decommissioning has grown over the past 5 years. To deliver these projects in a safe and economic way, decommissioning needs to be accepted as a serious challenge.

This paper describes how an exploration-and-production company successfully developed and applied a qualitative risk-based abandonment-prioritization strategy for an inventory of inactive subsea wells.

DNV GL is introducing a new, risk-based recommended practice for performing and qualifying well abandonments titled DNVGL-RP-E103, Risk-Based Abandonment of Offshore Wells.