Celebrating 25 years: well integrity then and now

Well integrity management has come a long way in the 25 years that Wood Group Intetech has been in business, says Dr Liane Smith. Here she looks at the development of well integrity management and the solutions that Wood Group Intetech has developed to support it.

“Wouldn’t it be great to be able to predict the failure date of these wells?” That was the question I asked a well manager in the early 1990s. He shrugged and told me he didn’t want to know: “If I tell my boss it will fail in three months, he’ll just tell me to come back and tell him when it has failed.”It wasn’t an unusual conversation at the time. Managing wells was about sorting out problems once a leak had been found. It was a reactive, not a proactive, process. Managing well integrity – a phrase that really didn’t exist at the time – was simply rolled into maintenance or safety procedures. And while successful producers did everything necessary for the safe operation of a well, there was little sense that if operations were managed more effectively it could prolong the life of the well and optimise output.

Early years

When we launched the company in 1990, we didn’t call ourselves well integrity experts. Our focus was on corrosion and materials selection. Our early years were spent developing critical services based on the team’s skills in materials selection for critical components on new projects that were going ahead in Oman and elsewhere.

By the end of the ‘90s, however, we were engaged by companies that wanted to understand why, when they pulled a piece of production tubing out of the ground, it was pristine when another, ostensibly identical piece of tubing, was riddled with holes. We carried out innovative studies that compared corrosion damage from calliper logs and, by looking at all the environmental parameters found in the production conditions, discovered which factors led to corrosion in some wells and not others.

That was the foundation of our well integrity management solutions. From there we developed a universal model that could be applied to any well in the world, and in 2000 we introduced ECE (Electronic Corrosion Engineer). ECE is now the world’s leading model for corrosion analysis in wells, flow-lines and facilities – and for materials selection for well tubing.

A broader evaluation of well problems

We then moved on to broader evaluation of well problems to cover sustained annulus pressure, the reliability of well components in service, and the optimisation of chemical treatments for corrosion and scale inhibition. By 2004, we had broadened our services and started to support operators with tools that focused much more on investigating and solving well integrity problems.

Of course, while we were developing these services, the industry we serve was also changing. Greater environmental awareness and more stringent HSE requirements in the late ‘90s and early 2000s caused operators to give more attention to how wells were designed and operated – a phenomenon we saw repeated around the world.

Equally important was the growing recognition that operators had a choice when it came to designing and operating wells. They could continue to focus solely on short-term safety management and immediate, but time-limited, returns. Or they could look at a more distant horizon and establish an operation that would be sustainable in the longer term – one of the philosophies behind the development of our solutions.

As a result, the past decade has seen operators think more about collecting the history of their experience and documenting relevant issues more carefully. This may have been done in a slightly ad hoc way initially but, in the following years, well integrity management emerged as a distinct discipline with clear requirements and processes.

Figure 1.Well integrity management is moving away from tolerating weekly snapshots of activity to an insistence on a real time capability

 

A software solution

Eventually, we distilled our expertise into the iWIT software. The tendency for greater instrumentation of wells, along with a drive for more automated data collection, has created a situation that lends itself to using database software systems that can process data in real time.

This is exactly what iWIT does: it helps operators move away from reliance on a daily or weekly snapshot of well activity and gives them a real-time picture of all aspects of well operation – plus immediate access to background documentation. Users of iWIT can identify immediately when a well goes out of its safe operating envelope and alert the relevant personnel so that potential problems do not become dangerous incidents.

We have also developed functionality for identifying the reliability of well equipment through our IQRA software. Greater automation allows for global pooling of non-proprietary data for better understanding of operational effectiveness. For example, by comparing the performance of a piece of equipment installed in the North Sea with other deployments of the same kit worldwide, operators can see whether their installation has a below- or above-average life-span. From there, they can establish whether it is the environment that is affecting performance, or whether training, maintenance or other controllable factors are at play.

Optimising production

Naturally, the past 25 years have also seen dramatic peaks and troughs in the price of oil – the current downturn being one of the more precipitous examples. In any situation where the margin on production narrows, operators naturally question every decision and seek to ensure that any intervention, treatment, logging, or inspection is the correct use of resources. They have to tune operations to minimise the duration of treatments or workovers, optimise the volume of chemicals used, and maximise output within the safe operating envelope. Well integrity management is playing an increasingly important role in optimising production and developing more risk-based maintenance schedules.

Finally, when we started, there was understandably much less concern about managing wells at the end of their predicted lifespan. But today, we are increasingly being asked by operators to assess older wells to establish whether they can continue producing. We have also, on occasion, been asked to evaluate the condition of long-term suspended wells to bring them back into production as a more cost-effective alternative to drilling new wells.

Digital integrity management systems now provide a critical role in the management and interpretation of overwhelming volumes of data that can now be extracted from each well. The deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for data gathering in remote locations creates significant possibilities for even greater well integrity solutions – particularly those that interface with multiple instruments and third party systems.

In the public arena, the oil and gas industry is frequently portrayed as old, slow to change and slow to innovate. However, our experience over the past 25 years suggests that this picture is not accurate. We continue to see many important proactive changes in the way assets are managed and operated. And we shall continue to innovate our products and services to give our clients the best possible solutions for whatever challenge they face next.

Adapted from an article written by Dr Liane Smith, managing director of Wood Group Intetech.

For further information please visit:http://www.intetech.com/

Read the article online at: https://www.oilfieldtechnology.com/special-reports/14012016/celebrating-25-years-well-integrity-then-and-now/