Drilling and Completions Technical Luncheon

Date: Tuesday, February 7 2017 Time: 11:45am-1:00 PM Location: Calgary Petroleum Club For more info refer to this link: goo.gl/aSvwt9

In fields produced with Electric Submersible Pumps (ESPs), such as many horizontal SAGD fields, it is common to design production wells with curvature values that are below specific limits to avoid damage to the ESP assembly during installation and pull operations, and with relatively straight tangent sections in which to land ESP assemblies to avoid premature curvature-related failures. In many companies, operations and production groups are being asked by their drilling and resource development departments to consider increasing well build rates and relaxing tolerances for tangent sections in an effort to reduce drilling and completion costs, increase resource exposure, and potentially also allow for an increase in the number of wells per pad. Operations and production groups are generally reluctant to relax wellbore curvature limits because it is believed that the near-term added drilling costs associated with these practices will be recovered over the full well life cycle in the form of operating cost savings associated with reduced ESP failure rates; however, it is often difficult to quantify these anticipated cost savings during the planning and design stage of the well life cycle, in part due to a lack of field-validated statistics or the tools to assess such potential cost-impact optimizations. This presentation will discuss how historical ESP reliability data is being used by some SAGD operators to inform decisions during the planning stage of a well’s life cycle to optimize the long-term economics of the well. The presentation will include a discussion of one Operator’s field experience and the broader impacts to SAGD operators employing ESPs.