Reliability and Safety Engineering
Well integrity risk model
- Client
- Major oil&gas operator
- Country
- Italy
- Year
- 2021
- Industry
- Oil & Gas
- Service
- Reliability and Safety
A major oil & gas operator needed to evaluate well integrity in production, injection and storage wells, where long-term exposure to corrosive fluids is a challenge. kwantis upgraded its blowout risk assessment system to cover these operations, CCS and H2 storage included.
- Blowout scenarios in the model
- 140+
The challenge
Energy companies face growing attention to their ESG reputation, and major oil & gas operators are paying more attention to asset reliability. Wells are exposed to corrosive fluids over the long term, which poses environmental challenges. In CCS operations in particular, well integrity has to be managed explicitly.
The operator needed its blowout risk assessment system to evaluate well integrity during:
- Production
- Gas and water injection
- CO2 injection for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)
- H2 storage
Our approach
kwantis upgraded the system. The risk assessment is based on Fault Tree Analysis, and the probability of losing well integrity is calculated from:
- Human errors
- Equipment reliability and testing frequency
- Annulus pressure conditions
The model covers more than 140 blowout scenarios. It also includes a new cement and tubular degradation model, which accounts for the corrosion of tubular materials and the carbonation of cement. This model was integrated to represent the environments of H2 and CCS wells, where well conditions are particularly severe for material durability.
The outcome
The upgraded system describes a wider set of operations accurately, with a detailed description of each phenomenon that occurs in them.
The operator now uses these calculations to answer governmental bodies, agencies and top management when they ask about its exposure to well blowout risk.
