Frac packing is one of the preferred completion techniques for deepwater wells in need of sand control. Frac pack completion performance and reliability can have a significant impact on the economic viability and profitability of a project, particularly for deepwater developments where the cost of intervention and completion failure can be very high. This work discusses key lessons learned and best practices identified from look back studies conducted on frac pack completions in deepwater fields across the world. The frac pack completion scorecard, a tool that provides a normalized means to evaluate the quality of the completion, thus avoiding possible bias based on reservoir parameters or wellbore architecture, focuses on key aspects of the well design and installation process, including rock stresses and well orientation, debris management, perforating, frac design and execution, fluid loss management, and mechanical issues with hardware components. The tool has been validated with data collected from more than 100 wells over a period of eight years, and has proved to be a valuable workflow for root cause analyses to identify probable causes for sand control completion failures, increasing skins and declining productivity index (PI) values over time. It has also been effectively used as a predictive tool for future well performance and to make data-driven, risk-weighted decisions concerning well deliverability thresholds. When the design and installation processes and procedures are shaped around scoring well on the scorecard, the results are better wells not only initially, but for the life of the project.

The use of deviated trajectories in deepwater completions is legitimately advocated by drilling constraints, but unfortunately production considerations have not been given the attention they deserve. A recently developed comprehensive semianalytical model using distributed volumetric sources offers a flexible and powerful computational tool that enables rigorous evaluation of a wide variety of possible flow patterns, including augmented wellbores due to "halo effects", combined flow towards the fracture and towards the remaining flowing perforations not connected to the fracture, turbulent flow effects and possible different levels of damage within the fracture and gravel pack regions.While the generalized high-performance fracture (HPF) model clearly indicates the well performance penalty for hydraulically fracturing a deviated well, for many operators the main reason for the hydraulic fracture is sand control. The high-performance fracturing (frac-pack) completion has proven to last for a significantly longer time and through much greater cumulative production than conventional (non-fractured) cased hole gravel pack (GP) completions. A key reason for the success in deviated wells may be that even though much of the flow to the well may bypass the hydraulic fracture, as long as flow to the well is mostly uniform, the potential for failure is low.This paper provides a broad based validation of the model using field data from a key deepwater region. Production and pressure transient data, and open and cased hole logs are used to evaluate the most likely flow geometry for each field case, and the results are compared to HPF model output. This provides a global assessment of the model versatility in modeling the production behavior of actual wells. In turn, this enables use of the model to benchmark the performance of any given well to what it could have had with more nearly optimal drilling and completion practices.