I found your name at the website www.wellintegrity.net and I find some of the contents quite informative and useful. I work as a Wells Integrity engineer in UK and is looking at a project to determine casing wall thickness (surface casing, conductor casing, intermediate casing) and remedial method to alleviate sustained casing pressure (SCP) in annulus.
So far I came across only one techniques to measure casing wall thickness and that is using pulsed eddy current (PEC). However the existing method is only for annulus without pressure. Are you aware of any other methods available and if yes, can the method be used in pressured annulus.
For remediation, I am only aware of VetcoGray casing annulus remediation (CAR) method to alleviate SCP besides lubricate/bleed. The equipment can work in reasonable annulus pressure (250 psi). Once again are you aware of any others in the market?
P.S.: By the way, can you tell me what is the intent of your website? I don’t see a forum whereby interested well integrity engineer can trade/share information. Is there plan for one?
Chih Chiang
Have a Safe Day and Regards
August 26, 2008 at 3:50 pm
You have lots of good questions, I’ll attempt to answer them. Note these are very common questions asked by well integrity engineers.
- Glad you found the web site helpful. I was on the SPE Distinguished Lecture circuit this year, topic was “Implementing a Well Integrity Management System”. I put this site together to provide references from the presentation to the folks that attended the presentation.
- I worked well integrity for BP in Alaska for 10 years, currently work special projects relating to well interventions.
- Casing wall thickness: if you are trying to determine casing wall thickness with the tubing still in the well, eddy current (also called magnetic flux) is about it. I’ve run ~2 dozen logs, the results are very qualitative. We have run them under pressure, you might contact both Schlumberger and PDS, they have different tools and different capabilities. Definitely don’t get your hopes up though.
- SCP on an annulus is one of the great headaches of well integrity. To design a remediation program, need to understand the source of the pressure (tubing pressure leaking into the A annulus? shallow gas entering the casing shoe? Other), status of the annulus (able to pump into it, current fluids, etc.), etc. We’ve run the VG CARS system, it’s very well designed, objective was to circulate in heavy fluid into an annulus, displacing the current (lighter?) fluid. There are a number of issues with this approach, including problems getting the hose to a sufficient depth to do any good and very slow pump rates. If you are interested in pursuing CARS to circ in heavy fluid, I suggest getting VG to share their case history summary with you – it’s not very encouraging. The wells we ran it on we were able to bleed off and run without using the lubricator. Note the hose stays in the well. I’m not aware of any other similar tools.
- Intent of the web site is to communicate information relating to well integrity, in support of the SPE DL program I was involved in.
- Your suggest to set up a forum is really good. I created a blog, added a link to it from the web site. Below is a link, posted this note on it. Note we set up a well integrity group in Yahoo several years ago, it never really caught on.
http://wellintegrity.wordpress.com/