Publications

The quality of old water injection wells often deteriorates over time due to pressure, temperature, or the soil surrounding the wells. Efforts to maintain integrity are essential to ensure water injections maintain environmental sustainability. Leaks at injection wells have the potential to contaminate surface water, making early detections and prompt shut off critical, though this results in a loss of injection capability for the field.

Repairs of injection well integrity have been carried out through casing sleeves, squeeze cementing, and wellhead replacement, following current available practices. However, methods to repair mechanical problems, such as leaks at deeper locations below the surface casing shoe, have repeatedly failed, leading to plans for permanent well abandonment. The Well Intervention team is exploring a new approach to extend the well's lifetime by inserting a smaller casing, ultimately transforming the well into a tubingless system or a monobore completion. Considerations before converting an injection well to a monobore completion include critical aspects such as isolation of the old perforation interval, wellhead and casing replacement, cementing, perforation, and injectivity tests. A trial injection well has been successfully reactivated by tubingless system and achieved a high injection rate of approximately 25 MBWIPD at 580 psi.

Well integrity issues can be effectively restored using a tubingless monobore completion approach. This method offers a cost-efficient and time-saving alternative to drilling new injection wells to replace problematic ones, allowing operators to optimize water injection well performance while ensuring long-term integrity. This paper offers valuable insights into the application of water injection integrity repair techniques and presents a systematic approach to well integrity restoration, enabling a deeper understanding of innovative solutions for addressing well integrity challenges in water injection operations, which can be adapted to similar field conditions.