This paper documents an 18-month expandable technology research and development effort that has culminated in a system that enables a new approach to reservoir architecture. The drive for maximum well productivity compels oil and gas companies to consider openhole completion strategies. However, historical uptake has been impeded by inability to achieve effective zonal isolation. The Expandable Reservoir Completion [ERC] combines slotted and solid expandable technology and features a return to conventional unexpanded premium connections to deliver a freely configurable reservoir completion architecture, offering a combination of openhole production performance and cased hole functionality. Fundamental to the new Expandable Reservoir Completion is a unique, selective rotary compliant expansion technique, which is used to clad the formation wall with expandable screens, slotted liner or solid tubulars with sealing units. This technique facilitates unparalleled flexibility in reservoir design by allowing sections of conventional casing to remain unexpanded between zones. This enables integration with conventional flow control and intelligent completion equipment, ultimately permitting selective isolation & production control. This paper outlines detailed test data generated by the development program, which included three downhole field trial installations. In addition to this, information from the first global commercial installations will be presented, from pre-job planning through to post installation performance review. The Expandable Reservoir Completion builds upon existing expandable sand screen and solid expandable technologies to deliver a combination of productivity and functionality previously unavailable to the petroleum industry. Introduction In recent years there had been few radical developments in the sand control arena. When the first Expandable Sand Screen [ESS] was launched in 1999 it was not only a significant departure from convention, it introduced the concept of direct screen contact with the formation as a means of reducing completion skin, thereby increasing productivity, and to boost reliability through improved sand retention characteristics. ESS has now been installed in over 350 wells in a variety of operating conditions in numerous locations worldwide. With this extensive track record, the base ESS technology platforms are now being integrated with new and conventional downhole technologies in a move to evolve the original, single zone reservoir system into a suite of solutions with multi-zone reservoir completion potential.

fax 01-972-952-9435. AbstractThis paper documents an 18-month expandable technology research and development effort that has culminated in a system that enables a new approach to reservoir architecture.The drive for maximum well productivity compels oil and gas companies to consider openhole completion strategies. However, historical uptake has been impeded by inability to achieve effective zonal isolation. The Expandable Reservoir Completion [ERC] combines slotted and solid expandable technology and features a return to conventional unexpanded premium connections to deliver a freely configurable reservoir completion architecture, offering a combination of openhole production performance and cased hole functionality.Fundamental to the new Expandable Reservoir Completion is a unique, selective rotary compliant expansion technique, which is used to clad the formation wall with expandable screens, slotted liner or solid tubulars with sealing units. This technique facilitates unparalleled flexibility in reservoir design by allowing sections of conventional casing to remain unexpanded between zones. This enables integration with conventional flow control and intelligent completion equipment, ultimately permitting selective isolation & production control. This paper outlines detailed test data generated by the development program, which included three downhole field trial installations. In addition to this, information from the first global commercial installations will be presented, from pre-job planning through to post installation performance review.The Expandable Reservoir Completion builds upon existing expandable sand screen and solid expandable technologies to deliver a combination of productivity and functionality previously unavailable to the petroleum industry.

The advent of Expandable Sand Screens (ESS) technology heralded a new era in mechanical downhole sand control by specifically addressing perceived limitations of standalone screens (SAS) and complexities of gravel packs. To date, ESS has been installed in over 400 wells worldwide under a variety of operating conditions, with the majority in single-zone environments. This paper describes designs aspects and applications engineering behind historical ESS applications, and discloses findings from a recent survey of these installations to derive key performance and reliability indices. A discussion of how these findings have been used to better understand and refine operations envelope for ESS and improve robustness of applications engineering to yield greater system reliability is also included. The productivity benefits of ESS technology, has been the subject of several authorative papers, with growing body of anecdotal evidence now in the public domain quantifying productivity gains achieved compared with other wells employing variety of other sand control techniques, particularly in open-hole environments. The drive for maximum well productivity compels many operators to consider openhole completion strategies. However, this has often not been possible through inability to achieve effective zonal isolation. Though ESS has been interfaced successfully with available annular barrier technologies to satisfy this goal in cased hole, technical limitations have constrained use in open hole. This paper documents therefore an 18-month expandable technology research and development effort that has culminated in the introduction of a wholly new multi-zone Expandable Reservoir Completion (ERC) architecture, where selective isolation or production provides advantage. This next generation ERC system combines slotted and solid expandable technology to deliver a reservoir completion with a combination of openhole production performance and casedhole functionality. Early results from initial ERC installations are showcased to illustrate system potential. Introduction In recent years there had been few radical developments in the sand control arena. When the first ESS was launched in 1999 it was not only a radical departure from convention, it introduced the concept of direct screen contact as a means of overcoming the limitations of SAS and complexities surrounding open hole gravel packs (OHGP). The design premise was that a compliantly expanded filter that could eliminate the screen-to-wellbore annulus would promote rapid formation stabilization and minimize the movement of sand particles around the screen under production conditions, resulting in reduced erosion and screen plugging. In so doing, and with the large directly exposed filter surface minimising pressure drop in the screen, both productivity and reliability would also be boosted1. The role of the reduction in the annular gap in increasing completion reliability has been discussed in Helland et al2 ESS was initially aimed specifically at openhole applications, with features such as large exposed filter area and variable ESS borehole contact (becoming known as compliant expansion) included to provide gravel pack functionality with the operational simplicity of a stand-alone screen. However, the applications envelope has over time extended to encompass cased-hole environments as a replacement for cased hole gravel packs (CHGP) and cased hole frac-packs (CHFP).

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