Relief Well Contingency Plans

Relief well plans are available in two formats: 

A General Relief Well Strategy process guideline that may be utilized by an operator as a future reference or training material if they are faced with a relief well drilling operation.  This information is critical for any operator who drills in deep water, a fragile environment, near population centers, HPHT wells, in remote locations or other high risk or high impact invironment.  Click here to see an example table of contents. General guidelines, however, do not consider particular problems that might be encountered peculiar to:

• Specific operating area (e.g., land, offshore, swamp, desert, arctic, remote, logistic problems).
• Type of operation (e.g., drilling, workover, completion, production).
• Special consideration (e.g., environmentally sensitive- pollution, high angle – horizontal wells, multi-laterals, clustered pads, simultaneous operations, etc.).
• Intersection considerations (e.g., formations, drilling problems, depth, temperature, casing requirements, formation resistivity for ranging, etc.).
• Kill considerations (reservoir flow potential - IPR, reservoir fluid properties – GOR, kill fluid storage and rate requirements, kill platform, kill equipment, one or two relief wells, etc.).

A Specific Relief Well Plan is made to cover these considerations specific for a given field, platform or well.  The planning process usually follows an evaluation of potential blowout scenarios for the well under study, chosing realistic scenarios for the plan, performing blowout flow simulations performed in conjunction with Well Flow Dynamics with OLGA-Well-Kill, evaluating relief well constraints for both the intersection and kill, designing an intersection plan, designing the kill hdyraulics using OLGA-Well-Kill, designing a kill plant, evaluating potential technical problems, evaluating potential logistical problems.  Click here to see an example table of contents.