Effective Gravel Pack Technique for Well Completion

Abstract

Sand production occurs when oil and gas is produced alongside reservoir formations at some point in the productive lifecycle of a well, understanding why reservoir produces sand is a crucial step towards managing sand production, the objective of this research is to improve the quality of produced fluid (oil/gas) for easy separation, the study method of this research work was basically a laboratory based sieve analysis of formation sand of a well in consideration, this is designed to achieve the most effective gravel pack grain size to be used, from the result analyzed with careful interpretations as presented, the Niger Delta Well-X formation comprise grain sizes of 0.0788” – 0.0025” range as captured from the available set of sieves used, the concentration of percentage retain falls within grain size 0.0197” – 0.007 1” with 0.0197” having about 41.4% retain by weight with the total grain weight of 737grams to stand at 305grams, while grain size 0.0118” had a percentage retained of 25.5% having a weight of 188grams and 0.0071” had a percentage retain of 12.9% with a weight of 95% respectively, keeping all other size to be 20.1%, for the sorting, 9.4 was calculated from the analysis of this research which makes the gravel pack to be well sorted. Therefore, permeability and plugging challenges are not a problem. The range of gravel size recommended for the gravel pack was kept at a minimum of 0.0727” and a maximum of 0.1639”. A screen size of 55 gauges was calculated to enable effective gravel pack placement operation, which is practical solution to sand production for the well investigated if properly managed.