This course provides techniques for testing, diagnosing, preventing and treating near wellbore formation damage problems. These problems include: fines migration, inorganic scales, paraffin and asphaltene precipitation, sand production, perforation plugging, clay swelling, water reinjection and invasion of mud solids, cement filtrates and completion fluids. The mechanisms of damage and the methods used to test and diagnose problem wells are emphasized.
Who Should Attend
Production and completion engineers responsible for well maintenance and production performance. Drilling and reservoir engineers interested in minimizing the formation damage impact of drilling, completion, production, injection and stimulation operations.
How You Will Benefit
The course teaches the use and interpretation of diagnostic testing of injection and producing wells to determine the extent, location and cause of the formation damage. Attendees will develop a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in near wellbore production problems allowing them to make better drilling, completion and production decisions that minimize or prevent formation damage.
Instructor
Mukul M. Sharma is Professor and holds the “Tex” Moncrief Chair in the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin where he has been for the past 27 years. He served as Chairman of the Department from 2001 to 2005. He founded Austin Geotech Services, a specialty consulting company and co-founded Layline Petroleum, a private E&P company.
His current research interests include hydraulic fracturing, improved oil recovery, injection water management, formation damage and petrophysics. He has published more than 250 journal articles and conference proceedings and has 15 patents. Sharma has a bachelor of technology in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and an MS and PhD in chemical and petroleum engineering from the University of Southern California.
Among his many awards, Dr. Sharma is the recipient of the 2009 Lucas Gold Medal, SPE’s highest technical award, the 2004 SPE Faculty Distinguished Achievement Award, the 2002 Lester C. Uren Award and the 1998 SPE Formation Evaluation Award. He served as an SPE Distinguished Lecturer in 2002, has served on the Editorial Boards of many journals, and taught and consulted for over 50 companies worldwide.
Length of Course
This course has been taught over two to five days depending on the topics covered and the level of detail.
COURSE OUTLINE
1. Introductory concepts
2. Inflow performance engineering
3. Outflow performance engineering
4. Clay mineralogy
5. Fines migration
6. Clay swelling
7. Damage due to drilling and completion fluids
8. Damage during perforating and cementing
9. Filtration requirements in waterflooding
10. Sand control
11. Water blocks, wettability alteration and emulsions
12. Paraffins, waxes and asphaltenes
13. Inorganic scales
14. Damage problems during acidizing
15. Damage issues in fracturing
16. Problem well diagnosis.