Standardization of Inactive Wells Audit Process for Well Abandonment and Production Enhancement Candidate Screening

Abstract

The reservoir management team is often facing a standardization challenge during audit and screening of inactive wells, especially if this task involves multiple mature oil reservoirs or fields. Such a well candidate screening process is normally required to select candidates for revival as well as plug and abandonment (P&A) candidates. Shut-in wells across different fields may be sharing common issues such as pressure depletion, liquid loading, and high water cut, however, the severity of well-related problems varies from one field to the other. This is in addition to the variation of wellbore mechanical issues such as well-bore integrity, wellbore accessibility, and others. This paper aims to demonstrate a workflow to provide a quantitative ranking of wells. It can be used to standardize an audit process during multi-reservoir or multi-field inactive-well candidate screening study. The standardization process was addressed by developing a tool that registers the shut-in well ranking upon completing the well potential and risk assessment process. Well level petroleum engineering and production data analysis such as decline curve analysis, nodal analysis and well modeling are performed to estimate the remaining well potential. Subsequently, to enable a comparison across different fields, behind pipe well potential was normalized using multi-field parameters. The audit process followed with well workover risking based on ease of workover intervention including workover options such as water shut off, remedial wellbore integrity work, stimulation and others where it also draws on local knowledge for well risk calculation. The approach presented in this study provides a comprehensive tool for both key performance indicators; remaining well potential and well risk, that are usually required to short-list wells for workovers. The standardized audit process was demonstrated in a case study where a large number of shut-in wells from multiple mature oil fields were ranked. In this study, the 7 highest ranked wells were recognized as production enhancement candidates and conversely, a number of wells with the lowest ranking were identified for well abandonment. Through this standardized workflow, the well risk assessment was performed efficiently with tools that enable a consistent result across different fields. It helped to accelerate the reservoir management decision-making process in identifying wells with the most impact to increase the success probability during inactive well revival and workover. The workflow and the tool presented in this paper has the potential to be used as analytic tool or template and can be used as a live document that may be adopted to reduce the workload and improve shut-in well management.