Study on Annular Pressure Buildup in Offshore Heavy Oil Thermal Recovery Wells Considering Dissolved Gas Contained in Annuli

Hao Wang, Hui Zhang, Jun Li, Anming Chen, Jun Liu, Tengfei Sun and Cong Lin
Additional contact information
Hao Wang: College of Petroleum Engineering, China University of Petroleum-Beijing, Beijing 102249, China
Hui Zhang: College of Petroleum Engineering, China University of Petroleum-Beijing, Beijing 102249, China
Jun Li: College of Petroleum Engineering, China University of Petroleum-Beijing, Beijing 102249, China
Anming Chen: Sinopec Huadong Oilfield Service Corporation, Nanjing 210000, China
Jun Liu: Sinopec Huadong Oilfield Service Corporation, Nanjing 210000, China
Tengfei Sun: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China
Cong Lin: AVIC China Aero-Polytechnology Establishment, Beijing 100028, China

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 11, 1-20

Abstract: In the offshore industry, especially heavy oil thermal recovery wells, due to the great temperature difference between the low-temperature seawater and high-temperature heavy oil, it is easy to cause the temperature increase of annular fluid in the operation process which will result in the annular pressure buildup phenomenon (APB). The increase of annulus pressure may lead to the failure of the casing and wellbore integrity, which will seriously affect the normal production and lead to great economic loss. In order to study the formation of APB and provide a basis for the field operation design, a radial full-size physical experiment of APB was carried out in this work and an annular pressure prediction model in the presence of dissolved gas was proposed based on the experimental results. The verification and comparison analyses of the full-liquid model and the dissolved gas model were conducted with the experimental data. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis of the influence of the dissolved gas volume fraction and casing deformation on APB was carried out. The results show that the prediction results calculated by the dissolved gas model are in good agreement with the experimental data and the prediction accuracy is higher than that of the full-liquid model. When the annular dissolved gas volume fraction is less than 0.1%, the full-liquid model can be used to simplify and approximate calculations. Ignoring casing deformation will produce prediction error in each annulus, which means this simplification should be used with extreme caution. This work provides a valuable experimental reference for the study of APB, as well as a novel model for APB prediction in the field.

Keywords: annular pressure buildup; dissolved gas; experiment verification; offshore wells; casing deformation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/11/3213/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/11/3213/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:14:y:2021:i:11:p:3213-:d:566041

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().