Plugging and Abandonment Collaborative Environment
Part of an operator’s responsibility once a field development has reached its economic end of life, is to return the field (as close as possible) to pre-development condition. One aspect of this is the plugging and abandonment of the well stock. Operators are exposed to billion dollar costs for P&A of wells in line with regulations. Technology and knowledge sharing in this cost-centre activity can play a significant part in reducing this exposure – so was born our PACE network.
The 10th PACE two-day network meeting in April 2020 was themed around rigless P&A.
Day one started with an operator news flash with 10 operators discussing their recent and upcoming P&A activities, challenges and other relevant information.
We then moved to a knowledge sharing mode, where operators and service companies shared presentations on topics such as:
- Using shale as a barrier (lab studies applied to a field case)
- Design, approach and challenges associated with an offshore P&A campaign
- Simulation of a risk-based P&A design
- Rig-less cement verification
- Inflatable packers for rig-less P&A
- Multi-barrier integrity evaluation
During day two, there were four main segments.
Firstly, two parallel sessions for service companies to present technology developments to an operator only audience, and then a service company session looking at challenges in P&A.
This was followed with a session that is unique to PACE called “Ask an operator”, where the audience got to ask an operator P&A SME about their P&A activities, views and opinions.
Lastly, OTM presented a comparison study of P&A regulations (number of barriers, plug length and verification requirements) between USA, UK, Norway and the Netherlands.
The next PACE meeting will take place on 15th / 16th September on “barrier verification and multi-string logging”.
Please contact Sally Marriage for more information.
