Transforming oil and gas recovery through expandable tubulars

Arthur Stautzenberger,
Sales & Operations Manager – Norway, Coretrax

As the energy transition ramps up, the oil and gas industry is currently grappling with the evolving challenges of declining reserves and more stringent environmental regulations. However, advancements in technology are revolutionizing the extraction of hydrocarbons from complex fields, enabling significant operational efficiencies to be harnessed.

Expandable tubulars have been a true game-changer in optimizing recovery from brownfields and the progression of this technology allows operators to solve well integrity issues such as reducing water production, sand ingress or non-producing perforations, without losing valuable inner diameter (ID) keeping the production viability high.

Norway is really leading the way in the adoption of innovations which actively tackle these challenges and the country currently has some of the highest recovery rates in the world. During a recent project in the region, Coretrax deployed its RelineDL expandable technology to enable an underproducing well to be retrofitted into a multi-lateral well to increase recovery while using existing infrastructure. The challenge to the retrofit design was to isolate the gas cap above the reservoir while maintaining an 8 ½” drift to enable multi-lateral completion. 

Following detailed pre-planning, a 8 5/8” x 0.417” expandable liner was deployed through the window in the 10 ¾” 60.7# casing into an under-reamed open hole section from 1,690 to 2,144m. Utilizing the 8 5/8 RelineDL to isolate the gas cap allowed the operator to kick-off from the existing 10 ¾”, saving valuable rig time by eliminating the need to re-drill the 12 ¼” section and install a new 10 ¾” casing and tie back. The liner was cemented in place for zonal isolation, with 502m of liner run in a single trip. Hydraulic pressure was used to pump the expansion cone from the bottom of the liner to the top before being pressure tested to 2,650psi. Finally, the liner shoe was successfully drilled out to allow the operator to continue operations. The use of the expandable liner delivered a post-expansion ID of 8.620” allowing the 8 1/2” section to be drilled and the deployment eliminated the requirement for additional drilling, delivering significant project efficiencies. The full project was completed in less than 40 hours.

As the energy landscape continues to evolve, and the need to maximise recovery of existing reserves becomes increasingly vital, technologies such as the ReLineDL demonstrate the requirement for innovative solutions to support industry objectives.

If you’d like to learn more about our expandable technology, Coretrax will be exhibiting with our colleagues on the Expro stand, Hall 2, booth 2200, at ONS from 26-29 August.