New feature in Oliasoft’s Blowout & Kill module
Oliasoft WellDesign prides itself in being user friendly, intuitive, effective and fast whilst not comprimising on accuracy. But we continously work to identify and implement functions that will improve the user experience even further.
Our latest update in the Blowout & Kill module is the “parallelisation option” – a feature that gives the user the opportunity to run a large number of kill simulations by the push of one button.
When designing a dynamic kill operation, the expression “there are more than one way to skin a cat” springs to mind. Should one select a high mud weight and a low pumping rate, or the opposite? Or perhaps something in between? The correct answer to this is that you want to land on a mud weight and a pumping rate combination that kills the well without risking fracturing the formation. And you need to be able to deliver the required rate down the relief well you’ve designed, with the available rig pumps.
It may be a time consuming, cumbersome and sometimes complicated operation to identify the ideal combination that fullfils this criteria. With the parallelisation option in the kill module in Oliasoft WellDesign, you can now pick a base case mud weight and pumping rate, press run and let the machine do the work whilst you do something else. Minutes later, a result matrix is presented for 25 runs. 5 mud weights, 5 pumping rates.
A traffic light system is implemented – green colour (success) signifies a successful kill operation without fracturing the formation/shoe. Red colour (fail) signifies that a dynamic kill is not obtained. Yellow colour (partial) signifies a dynamic kill, but the fracture pressure is exceeded.
The first example below is a case with a fairly low blowout rate and a relatively large margin between the pore pressure and the fracture gradient. This gives the engineer a lot of flexibility when choosing a mud weight and pumping rate for the design of the well kill operation.
The second example shows a case where the user quite quickly realises that the kill operation is challenging and the one combo that is successful, requires a mud weight and a pumping rate that can be very difficult to obtain. This is not unusual for a high blowout rate gas well and the result may e.g. be that the engineer needs to redesign the well’s casing program.
Apart from saving a lot of time there are some other clear advantages from this new feature.
In case 1, had the engineer run the 1.3 sg and 5500 lpm combo only, he/she could have concluded that this is a good solution, without realising that the schedule is on the very border of failing, i.e. not being able to kill the well. Similarly, if 1.4 sg and 7000 lpm had been chosen, a schedule with a fairly large risk of fracturing the formation could have been chosen. The parallelisation ensures the engineer elects a more robust kill schedule with a lot of redundancy and a safer operation, e.g. 1.3 sg and 6500 lpm.
In case 2, the engineer will very quickly focus on mitigating options, as it is clear that there is not much flexibility, neither increasing the mud weight or decreasing the pumping rate will make the situation any better.
