Safeguarding Well Integrity through Vigilant Sand Production Monitoring and Surveillance in Digital Field

Abstract

Prevention is better than cure is the right phrase to express how important sand production monitoring and surveillance to protect well integrity which consequently help securing environment, people, asset and also reputation without causing unnecessary restrictions to the production performance. This paper showcases the benefits gained from utilizing an automated Digital Integrated Operations System, or "IO" to enhance the existing Sand Monitoring and Management (SMM) workflow. Sand production will impose significant impact and key failure are mostly related to erosion and sand accumulation. Reactive management approach can be implemented in a faster manner should we have good surveillance. The IO was designed to provide critical information on the historical and current status and operating conditions of wells, production and injection equipment, as well as daily production and injection volumes based on data fed from the thousands of transmitters installed at the plant. The system is used for different applications related to production surveillance and optimization, and also includes sand management as a core module. For this purpose, it utilizes the SMM workflow by enabling visual monitoring of well sand count data and compliance to well sampling plan in the IO platform, and by performing daily computation of erosional rates together with remaining wall thickness on surface flowlines - achieved by combining live well parameters with latest sand count data, latest well test and erosion rate. Upon stringent monitoring, two (2) wells were identified by IO to be under high risk and quick action was taken to manage the risk. From IO, number of times that each well had been categorized under severity were then be validated by checking in the input data. From well monitoring and surveillance, flowing tubing head pressure (FTHP) were seen lower than trending and bean size had been fully opened. Knowing that the well is prone to be producing high amount of sand and expose to downhole integrity issue, the sand production must be controlled before it reaches to the surface. The immediate action was to choke down the well, monitor the FTHP, evaluate well test performance trending and most importantly increase the frequency of sand count. After doing so, the team observed that erosion rate has been reduced below the limit and sand count was also reduced. Simple action can be taken if we know what is the root cause in a timely manner. All this will be possible through IO. Visualization had been transparent, communication was enhanced, and collaboration boosted towards safe operation.