Abstract
Tengizchevroil (TCO) deployed a cloud-based solution in 2022, adopting engineering planning workflows to enhance collaboration among all disciplines' experts—wells drilling, geologists, geomechanics, and service providers. The key benefit was having one integrated solution that contains multiple engines and communicates with geological software, thus minimizing data re-entry and reducing manual inputs or requests to a minimum. At the time of the cloud-based deployment and adoption, the casing design workflow was considered a very complex task that needed to be verified and validated by subject matter experts. This paper outlines the casing design validation and verification process within the cloud-based solution, its results, lessons learned, and the way forward for the process.
TCO utilizes two generic casing designs for all wells, which is selected based on production reservoir targets. Design standard requires performing casing design analysis for each individual well using tailored software and then validating against design requirements.
The cloud-based solution offers both uniaxial and triaxial stress analysis for casing design, accounting for multi-axis stresses with a predefined set of load cases. This capability allowed subject matter experts to create load cases and customize workflows to align with standard TCO policies. Casing design relies on several engineering inputs, such as trajectory, wellbore schematics, pore and fracture pressure windows, drilling fluids, casing integrity tests, and other parameters. When any of these engineering inputs are altered, ensuring changes are reflected in the casing design calculation, is always a challenge. The single-entry approach of the digital platform accounts for changes and minimizes mistakes by ensuring data is entered by domain experts, thereby improving the accuracy and efficiency of the casing design process. The cloud-based solution's ability to create customized-automated load cases significantly reduces the need for manual data entry to calculate internal or external pressure profiles.
As part of the verification and validation process, TCO, collaborating with a subject matter expert, confirmed the cloud-based solution outputs provide comparable results against the previously used software, resulting in the acceptance of the new TCO Casing Design Process.
For the TCO project, the way forward involves continuing to use cloud-based solution as a tool for future planning and execution of the well construction. The uniqueness of this paper lies in its focus on the integration of digital tools that streamline complex calculations for the Casing Design analysis and foster collaborative workflows, exemplified by TCO's successful implementation of the new process.
