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18 days on the Central Azeri platform, from the 21st of May to the 7th of June.
This job was an open hole gravel pack with DTS. So they drilled to the reservoir and cased the hole, then they drilled out a large hole in the reservoir and insert sand screens, outside of this screen they pump specially sized gravel. The gravel is designed to prevent the reservoir walls (sand) from collapsing in on itself and closing the well. If you produce oil then there are fluid drag issues, the faster you produce the more drag, the sand screen is there to keep the well open whilst maintaining fast production. This well will produce around 25 thousand barrels of oil per day when it is finished and allowed to produce. The DTS part of this job was to install a loop of control line which passes from the top of the well to the bottom then up again. A hydralic wet mate system is used so that the completion can be run in two stages, the lower then the upper. This job appeared to be a success and at the end of the job we were able to pump down one side and get returns up the other. The control lines extend for around 10km, 5 up and 5 down. In a few weeks I may return and be involved in pumping an optical fiber down this control line to enable distributed temperature measurments in the well. We had a couple of problems during the job. At one point the control lines were crushed due to either a mechanical or human error by a different company. At this point we had to pull back everything out of the well and start again with a new control line. It was a pain in the arse and wasted over 20 hours. When we started again we had a problem with a cable protector and we managed to crush part of the control line. I took a couple of pictures of the damage; luckily the damage was next to a union where we connect two different assemblies so we just cut the bad bit off and yanked it down abit. To solve the problem of the crushing I took one of the protectors to the mechanical workshop on the rig and got some of the guys there to file down the channels on the protector to increase the clearance. This way the control line wouldnt be crushed against the coupling when we torque up the protector. The most interesting event which happened on the platform was a "yellow shutdown". The platform alarm went off and we had to go to our muster points and put a lifejacket on. At the same time all oil production from the grouping of three platforms was automatically stopped along with all injection activities. It was later discovered to be a false alarm, some piece of electronics had died and triggered the alarm. At a meeting a week later we were told that the shutdown resulted in a loss of 300 000 barrels of oil. That is about 20 million dollars at todays prices :-) |