Deep well evaluation and completion

Planning for the completion of a deep well is a process that should begin long before drilling ever starts, and may be the most critical of design criteria. This is a lesson learned from numerous cases of frustration and even failure during the surge of deep drilling activity over the last several years. It is disappointing to an operator or a service company to arrive at casing point or time to stimulate a deep well, and find that the list of treatment options available is severely restricted by a planning oversight that occurred while the well was still on the drawing board. Equally frustrating is the inability to accurately predict or evaluate results due to the absence of data that could have been obtained in the drilling or completion process, but were overlooked in planning. This study highlights some of the recent developments in deep well completion technology that should be considered early in the planning process. Some of them, such as the use of in situ stress analysis to determine if there is a preferred fracture plane, might have an impact on the desired location of the prospect.