Hydrawell remedial cement barriers installed in Alaska

Developed to remove the bulky cost of the drilling rig or workover unit during well decommissioning, test deployment of HydraCT™ in 2021 showed excellent cement bonding with an ultrasonic cement evaluation tool and, on recovery of the casing, 100% cement fill up in the annulus was seen.

Since then, a total of 11 remedial cement barriers have been installed using HydraCT™ on the North Slope, predominantly using 2 in. coiled tubing at a depth of 4500 ft. As part of the client’s verification process, six of the 11 cement plugs were drilled out and logged providing confidence for and acceptance by the State Regulator of the suitability of the installed barriers as final well abandonment barriers.

As well as optimising the operational aspects of plug and abandonment activities by removing the rig, design aspects are also optimised by using a bespoke well candidate screening process incorpora ting CFD (computational fluid dynamics) modelling.

Commenting on the success of entry into the Alaskan market, Patrick Anderson Operations Manager said: “As part of HydraCT™ service delivery we go through a full selection process to identify the best tool set-up and system configuration based on the system and fluids available to deploy the tool and the environment within which the tool will be run. Verification of the design is provided by comparison to a large database of similar installed barriers as well as through CFD simulation in a representative digital twin.”

Read the article online at: https://www.oilfieldtechnology.com/product-news/09022024/hydrawell-remedial-cement-barriers-installed-in-alaska/