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Delattre Et Al., 2004 Petit and Iqbal, 2007: 3.5.3. Testing and Selection of Screens and Completion Fluids

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Delattre Et Al., 2004 Petit and Iqbal, 2007: 3.5.3. Testing and Selection of Screens and Completion Fluids

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Raed fouad
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174 Standalone Screens

A further modern example of the successful use of standalone screens is found in


Angola with the deepwater Girassol field (Delattre et al., 2004; Petit and Iqbal,
2007). Here, the uniformities are reasonably low (D40/D90 between 1.8 and 7.7 and
averaging 3), but laminated shales are present and cut by the wells giving a net-to-
gross of 50–70%. Wire-wrapped standalone screens are used in high-angle wells.
Frac packs are preferred for lower-angle wells, stacked reservoirs or for fine sands.
Base pipe screens of 6 5/8 in. are used to limit horizontal pressure drops, and this
required the use of 9 1/2 in. reservoir sections and 10 3/4 in. production casing.
Originally, large shale sections were isolated with ECPs, but this technique has now
been abandoned as rock testing identified that the shale intervals would creep and
self isolate without forming excess quantities of fines. Wire-wrapped screens were
chosen because of their self-cleaning design. Testing identified no advantage with
the higher inflow area of premium screens. The mud is thoroughly conditioned
(210 mesh) before the screens are run with some finer solids mud (310 mesh)
spotted across the open hole. A feature of these high-rate wells is a rigorous,
systematic clean-up approach (step rates of 2000 bpd) to ensure that stable arches
form at low rates where velocities and erosion rates are low. PLTs have shown an
even flow along the well – the key to minimising screen erosion. A uniform inflow
profile would equate to a maximum radial velocity of 0.07 ft/sec compared with
erosion requiring velocities of a few feet/second. Given the expense of performing
PLTs, skin factors from pressure build-up analyses can be used to predict the
effective percentage contribution along the well length. After five years of
production, the separators were cleaned and the sand excavated was consistent with
sand produced through screen gaps. Indeed correctly designed standalone screens
(and expandable screens) will likely produce continuous fine sand. This feature
needs to be communicated to those engineers designing the surface/subsea facilities.

3.5.3. Testing and selection of screens and completion fluids


Given that the use of uniformity and fines content guidelines is now, where possible,
being replaced by mechanical testing using real screen and formation samples, the
question arises how these tests should be performed. The development of bridging
against a screen can be simulated as can plugging of the natural sand pack or
screen along with solids production through the screen. For a standalone screen
(as opposed to a gravel pack or compliantly expanded screen), the rock will
generally fail and be transported to the screen. A slurry test is therefore appropriate
for the selection of screens. These tests have the advantage of being able to compare
dissimilar types of screens, that is, wire-wrapped versus woven ‘nominal’ screens.
Various attempts have been made to compare the performance of different filtration
technologies, for example, precise glass micro-beads or using screen performance
curves (Underdown et al., 1999; Constien and Skidmore, 2006), but they all suffer
due to the uniqueness of formation sand and how different types of screens respond
to the ranges in sand particles.
Several rules of thumb are available for screen sizing. These are widely used for
wire-wrapped screens or the equivalent-sized pre-pack and premium screen where
the equivalence has been assessed. Coberly (1937) suggested a criterion of 2  D10

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