Repsol Sinopec Brazil, Ouro Negro and the Mechanical Engineering Department of PUC-Rio’s technical and scientific centre (CTC/PUC-Rio) are expanding the technological partnership they established in the first semester. The aim of the new technological agreement is to develop a through tubing logging profiling tool to assess cement quality in lined wells.
“The proposal is to have a tool that enables the detection of cement anomalies in the adjacent layer and not only in the layer closest to the tool, as occurs in the case of solutions that are currently available in the marketplace, thus avoiding the removal of the production tubing to perform this operation,” explained Támara García, research and innovation manager at Repsol Sinopec Brazil.
Put more simply, while the current technology allows one to ‘see’ the integrity of the cement only when it is closer to the tool, the solution that will be developed by the three partners will make it possible to have a powerful ‘vision’, going beyond a single wall. “The potential in both well abandonment and interventions is enormous.,” she added.
According to Ouro Negro CEO, Eduardo Costa, the idea is to incorporate TTilt in the future into the Wellrobot®, thus making the system even more autonomous. This will reduce the need for well interventions, with their high costs and impacts. This is because the robot is permanently installed in the well, continuously analyzing and passing the data on to the FPSO topside, to a ROV or even to an AUV that is passing through the area to collect data”, the executive explained.
“The TTilt on its own would be extremely disruptive. However, its incorporation into the Wellrobot® and all these other possibilities would take this disruption to a currently unimaginable, albeit perfectly possible, level,” Tamara Garcia added.
Professor Arthur Braga, of CTC/PUC-Rio’s Mechanical Engineering Department, who leads the university side of the partnership, observed that plugging and abandonment (P&A) operations present enormous technical and economic challenges for the oil and gas industry.
“To be permanently abandoned the well must be sealed hydraulically in order to isolate the reservoir and other fluid-bearing formations, thus preventing leaks into the vicinity and potential large-scale environmental disasters,” he explained. “Hence the importance of developing technologies to assess cement integrity and its sealing capacity.”
