Snake wells are laterally weaving ("snaking") extended reach horizontal wells that drain a number of vertically stacked, structurally dipping reservoirs. This creates multiple drainage points in each sand and effectively achieves a similar drainage pattern to a multilateral well at a fraction of the cost and technical complexity. The wells are completed with multiple hydraulically controlled interval control valves (ICV) and external casing packers or swellable packers. In addition, the completion includes permanent downhole gauges (PDHG) and distributed temperature sensing (DTS). Seven of these smart snake wells have been successfully drilled in Champion West as of April 2006 and three more are planned during the remainder of 2006.
The well design not only facilitates initial clean-up, but is used for reservoir management purposes and to manage gas and water breakthrough. Throughout the well life, variable ICVs are used to achieve equal drawdown along the well bore, leading to a significant increase in reserves by delaying gas breakthrough.
In addition, some unexpected benefits materialized from the use of smart completions: In one case, the smart completion enabled the clean-up of the initially uncompleted toe, significantly increasing total recovery from the well. In another case, the smart completion mitigated the risk from a potentially bad cement job, saving a cement repair job or, more likely, a sidetrack. In another well the flexibility of the design enabled the effective shutoff of water bearing zones that were drilled because of slight departures from the planned well trajectory. Through modification of the planned segmentation an expensive re-drill was avoided.
The smart snake wells have thus been a key enabler for the economic development of the Champion West field and we expect they will continue to add further value over the lifetime of the wells.
Introduction
The Champion West field, discovered in 1975, is situated offshore Brunei in a water depth of 40 to 50 m. The area extent of the field is about 12 × 4 km. Although more than 30 wells have been drilled, including a number of appraisal sidetracks, less than 20 percent of the estimated reserves have been produced so far.
The field consists of a number of elongated fault blocks. In the vertical sequence each fault is made of multiple, stacked thin sands, interbedded with shale layers. In total, the vertical sequence contains more than 100 individual reservoirs isolated by shale layers.
This work has a focus on the self-emulsifying drug delivery system (SEDDS), which can be used in pharmaceutical field for increasing bioavailability of poorly water-soluble drugs. The model drug resveratrol was used because of its poor water-solubility and is of interest because of its wide range of pharmacological effects. It is beneficial to understand the mechanism of SEDDS formation in the human body, therefore, the determination of nanoscale structure was carried out. For this purpose, small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), photon correlation spectroscopy (PCS), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques were applied. We have found that the size and size distribution of particles were in nanometers. The inner structure of SEDDS was ordered with the lamellar distances (d-spacing) of < 20 nm. It seems that the prepared SEDDS in water form large oil drops (200-400 nm) in water as well as small micelles with the droplet size of 10-20 nm.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.