A Supplement to:

DRILLINGTESTING

Real-time Tests Make Fiscal Sense

At $8 a second or a spread cost of $750,000 a day, operators need to conserve rig time.
By Don Lyle, Executive Editor, E&P

n operator working deep water off West Africa discovered the value of running a well test in real time with multiphase metering as it turned uncertainty into positive, useful information for field development. The operator had completed a deepwater well with a gravel pack using brine in an open-hole completion. High cleanup rates were required for the well, and foam became a major issue as the operator flowed the well back to a conventional separator system for testing, said Mike Jardon, vice president of testing services for North America for Schlumberger. The foam wouldnt allow the company to get an accurate gas rate measurement. In addition, the oil and brine formed an emulsion and gave the operator an artificially high oil reading, because the equipment couldnt completely separate out the brine. The operator came to Schlumberger for a solution and agreed to try the companys Vx system, a multiphase well testing technology that doesnt require separation for rate measurements (Figure 1). The Vx system includes a venturi mass-flow measurement and fast, dual-energy gamma measurements to determine ratios of oil, gas and water in a flowing well test. The company installed the Vx system and got an accurate reading immediately, in real time. That was tremendously valuable to the client. Without those measurements, it couldnt accurately estimate reserves and water-oilgas proportions, Jardon said. 28

Figure 1. Teams take a reservoir fluid sample from the PhaseTester Vx multiphase flowmeter. (Photos courtesy of Schlumberger) Most wells produce in multi-phase flows, but multi-phase measurement is particularly critical in deepwater wells because of the shortened operating time which saves rig time. The initial flow period is much shorter. With rig rates at three-quarters of a million dollars a day, time is important, he said. One example of that importance is in the Wilcox (Lower Tertiary) play in deep water in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico. This is a subsalt reservoir often with low relative pressure, and an operator cant get a good handle on the reservoir without tests. A wrong decision in dealing with huge fields at those water and formation depths could cost operators billions of dollars, he said. The testing system also is more compact at 8ft by 8ft by 7ft (2.4m by 2.4m x 2.1m) than a separation system, an important feature when deck space is at a premium. www.eandpnet.com July 2007

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Figure 2. A crew prepares a SenTREE subsea completion and test tree for a deepwater operation in the Gulf of Mexico. The system also ties into the companys data acquisition, reporting, and transmission system that can handle the high-data-sampling rates with 100 to 2,000 times the data of older, conventional systems. That system allows immediate well analysis and reservoir interpretation. This helps the operator determine how to choke the well and at what rates to properly flow the well. Those are some critical reasons Schlumberger considers multiphase metering one of its top three technologies for deep water. The second technology in the companys top three for deepwater is perforating at extreme pressure. Tubing-conveyed perforation has been around for a long time, but its particularly sensitive in deep wells in deep water when pressure in the well or a heaving deck on the surface vessel increases the risk of inadvertent gun detonation. The companys smart firing system with its intelligent remote implementation system uses distinct pressure pulses to fire the perforating guns and reduce the risk of inadvertent gun detonation. The company also developed the system to operate at 25,000psi at a time when

standard systems could only perforate at 15,000psi of pressure. The new technology allows the company to perforate in more than 8,000ft (2,440m) of water. The third key development for current deepwater operations is the companys SenTREE HP subsea well control service (Figure 2). This is an in-marine-riser completion system with a 6 3/8-in. inside diameter and it can handle the tensile load generated HYTORC has invented every single major when operating in water improvement of modern hydraulic torque wrenches in depths up to 10,000ft the last 25 years, to give you the latest Technological Product which handles any job you have and any one (3,050m) and pressures you might come across, safely! up to 15,000psi. An operator also can disconnect the system in as little as 15 seconds in the event of SALES SERVICE RENTALS a dynamic positioning or mooring issue. The electro-hydraulic sys-

tem works much faster than a standard hydraulic system that can take 2 to 3 minutes for a disconnect. The operator also can return and re-connect without pulling the string, Jardon said. Schlumberger is aware the industry is moving into deeper and deeper water, and a lot of the development work for that campaign is in the Gulf of Mexico. The company has set a lot of depth and pressure records in the Gulf in the past couple of years. As for the future, Discoveries are still going on. The next frontier is in more than 10,000ft of water, he said. Those depths will generate pressures moving toward the 30,000-psi mark. Drilling vessels, test trees and completion trees are pushing their limits now, he added. In the future, it will no longer be good enough to upgrade current technology. The next steps will be an industry-wide technology leap to get beyond 10,000ft of water.

DEEPWATER DEVELOPMENT www.eandpnet.com

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