Evaluation of Work Flow in Drilling and Completion

Abstract

Integrity verification is essential to safe planning of wells. Although the complexity of wells has increased over the last decades, the process of integrity verification has not seen any significant changes. In order to reduce the number of engineering hours spent planning new wells, the work process, and corresponding engineering software needs improvements to be compatible with today s requirements.In this thesis, tubing stress analysis and casing wear simulations have been conducted for an High-Pressure High-Temperature (HPHT) well on the Norwegian continental shelf using the industry leading software tools. Both the work process and engineering software have been subject to investigations.The tubing sees excessive forces from high temperatures and high pressures in the well. In order to verify the integrity of the tubing, possible well scenarios are modelled in the Landmark WellCat software. As the production casing serves as a well barrier during production, it is of high importance that casing wear does not compromise the integrity of the casing. Petris DrillNET has been used to model wear from drilling operations on the casings. Improvements to the work process and engineering software are suggested in order to simplify the integrity modelling and reduce the engineering time spent on well planning. Based on the above mentioned work, the following points of improvement have been identified:- Implementation of standards and technical requirements in the engineering software. - Reduction of software input parameters through the establishment of a company specific database of parameters. - Need for improved communication between software models to reduce the iterative nature of well planning.