Ensuring Effective Downhole Corrosion Control Management Through the Newly Integrated Corrosion Monitoring Surveillance System

Abstract

Corrosion challenges in production and injection wells are common in the oil and gas industry. The detrimental outcomes of corrosion affect the service life of a well. The necessity of dependable corrosion management solutions that can precisely measure corrosion rates is essential when taking into consideration the expense of maintenance and repair because of corrosion and material failures. In this paper, a successful deployment of a newly re-designed downhole corrosion monitoring tool with a custom-designed Downhole Coupon Holder Assembly (DCHA) is discussed. Electrical resistance (ER) corrosion probes are widely used in the petroleum industry for corrosion rate surveillance. To keep track of metal loss, the ER probes measure the electrical resistance, which rises as the size of the consumable test coupon reduces. The weight loss corrosion coupons, one of the oldest and most well-known corrosion monitoring techniques, are still widely used to this day. Examining the Mils-Per-Year (MPY) rate of corrosion on a used coupon can give an indication of the material's durability. The integrated innovation, the ER+ tool, was equipped with a specially configured resistivity probe to measure downhole temperature and metal loss data and hosted with a set of six metal coupons in a single coupon holder. It was deployed in a water supply well for a period of 83 days. After a successful retrieval of the tool, the downhole data was downloaded and the metal coupons were analyzed for metal loss profiling, surface profilometry, X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF), and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) imaging analysis. The results conclude that the ER+ tool offers an excellent platform allowing downhole screening of multiple tubing metallurgies for future tubing materials selection and design in a single deployment, i.e., shortening the overall well downtime. In addition, the ER+ tool enables the evaluation of corrosion inhibitor efficacy for different metallurgies. The results will be further used to design an effective and timely downhole inhibitor injection batch treatment schedule and doses for better downhole integrity maintenance. In the long run, the operational and maintenance costs are foreseen to be reduced significantly. The deployment of the integrated ER+ tool showed an excellent understanding of the recorded corrosion rate, and temperature data and establishes the effectiveness of corrosion inhibitor treatments with improved battery life for better surveillance monitoring.