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Abstract
Managing well integrity is essential to economically develop oil and gas
resources while preserving the environment and assuring safety to
personnel.
The industry accepted definition of well integrity management is the
application of technical, operational and organizational solutions to reduce
the risk of uncontrolled release of formation fluids over the entire lifecycle
of the well. (NORSOK-D010)
Well Integrity assurance on the other hand is to ensure the availability and
functionality of at least two well barriers during its drilling, production and
abandonment phases.
The current worldwide focus is on the development of systems and processes to
manage the well operations and interventions to assure well integrity with many
claims to have a workable system that verifies and confirms the status of wells
with suspect integrity.
The bases for well integrity management systems can be categorized as;
• R
& D oriented systems that are built around the development of technical
solutions to well construction and operational problems. For example, the
development of new inspection logs, cements, materials, equipment and
techniques.
•
Statistically driven, those are based on the study of
the historical failure frequencies and the assessment of associated risk.
• Well
pressure monitoring and assessment and wellhead maintenance.
•
Reservoir model based system that takes into
consideration the reservoir development to ensure well integrity throughout the
field development and production life.
In this paper different well integrity management systems were reviewed against
worldwide industry expectations for a system that can manage well integrity
that starts at the exploration phase and continues through its
abandonment.
Introduction
Developing and implementing well integrity management systems has lately been
the focus of the oil and gas industry worldwide.
During the periods of high demand for energy to fuel the expanding world
economies, oil and gas fields were developed on a fast tract basis. Wells were
drilled and put online in record time as drilling days, footage, and direct
costs became the exclusive performance indicators in those periods. In
addition, and in order to keep the high production potential, old wells were
kept on production beyond their projected life span.
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