Ceramic Sand Screen Design Enhancement Lessons Learnt from Initial Field Installations of through Tubing Applications in Offshore East Malaysia to Improve Well Performance

Abstract

Abstract Formation sand production is one of the major production challenges in most of the mature fields in Malaysia. Often, failure in primary sand control equipment requires the operators to adopt through-tubing sand screens as a remedial sand control. Current remedial sand control techniques utilizing metallic through tubing sand screens experience rapid wear, forcing the operator to control sand production by beaning down wells and thereby managing sand production at surface, in worst cases wells have to be shut-in. More robust technologies replacing conventional metallic screens are required. For these applications, alternative technology with ceramic sand screens have been deployed to enable higher productivity and offer enhanced resistance against erosion. Ceramic sand screens passed through a technical qualification process at Petronas and deployed in field applications both in oil and gas producers for through tubing interventions. To date 30 well interventions have been performed in various Petronas assets of Offshore East Malaysia with mixed results. Eight screen failures were observed with longevity ranging from 2.5 days to 15 months of production after installation. On average, ceramic sand screens greatly enhanced productivity return through longer performance than the conventional through tubing metallic screens from previous deployments. However, it was both the intent of product provider and Petronas to further improve Through Tubing Ceramic Sand Screen (TTCSS) performance based on the lessons learned from these failures. The TTCSS failures were first presented in the paper: SPE 196479 MS published at SPE APOGCE October 2019, Bali, Indonesia which which focused on the failures of these first generation TTCSS screen designs. This paper describes in more detail the value driven process and collaboration steps between 3M and Petronas to improve TTCSS field performance as a methodology to increase incremental field production to further increase longevity of downhole sand control in these applications. To enable this goal, a root cause analysis process entailed involving tear down investigation, hypothesis of failure characteristics, application review and investigation analysis with tools such as CFD and laboratory testing resulting in the implementation of ceramic sand screen design enhancements to improve performance in further Petronas deployments.