ScienceDirect defines an oil and gas well workover as:
…any kind of oil and gas well intervention involving invasive techniques, such as wireline, coiled tubing, or snubbing. It is an expensive process of pulling and replacing a well completion to repair an existing production well for the purpose of restoring, prolonging, or enhancing the production of hydrocarbons.
An instrumentation & electrical foreman with an oil & gas producer shares his story well workover productivity gains in an Oil & Gas Engineering article, Wireless monitoring saves hours on each well workover.
Collaboration is critical for success.
Workovers require coordination among company personnel, outside contractors and equipment suppliers—and often must be performed in harsh winter environments…
With hundreds of wells, these productivity gains add up.
A typical well runs unassisted for 18 months to five years; a workover is then performed to add plunger lift assist, extending production for another 15 to 30 years.
Removing and reinstalling instrumentation on each well is time consuming.
Each workover requires the disconnection and reconnection of five pressure instruments. If all goes well, this process typically takes four to six hours, but often much longer due to issues with disconnecting and reconnecting wired instruments.
Having wireless instrumentation for these pressure measurements—tubing pressure, casing pressure, surface casing pressure, intermediate casing pressure, and flowline pressure—dramatically reduces time spent.
Since upgrading from wired to wireless instruments, the workover time has become much more predictable, and the time required for an instrumentation and electrical (I&E) tech to be onsite has been reduced from five hours to 15 minutes.
Another advantage of the switch from wired to wireless instruments is removing issues associated with cable and wire termination maintenance.
Damage to instrument cabling is quite common due to pinching or breaking of the wiring within a conduit…
Read this case study for how the wireless devices and wireless network were implemented and how other wireless devices were added to perform other functions such as emergency stop.
You can connect and interact with other pressure measurement and oil & gas industry experts in the Measurement Instrumentation and Oil & Gas groups in the Emerson Exchange and/or at the September 23-27 Emerson Exchange conference in Nashville.
