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The most important mechanical properties of casing and tubing are burst strength, collapse resistance and tensile strength. These properties are necessary to determine the strength of the pipe and to design a casing string. If casing is subjected to internal pressure higher than external, it is said that casing is exposed to burst pressure loading. Burst pressure loading conditions occur during well control operations, casing pressure integrity tests, pumping operations, and production operations. The MIYP of the pipe body is determined by the internal yield pressure formula found in API Bull. This equation, commonly known as the Barlow equation, calculates the internal pressure at which the tangential (or hoop) stress at the inner wall of the pipe reaches the yield strength (YS) of the material.
To evaluate a given casing design, a set of loads is necessary. Casing loads result from running the casing, cementing the casing, subsequent drilling operations, production and well workover operations. Temperature changes and resulting thermal expansion loads are induced in casing by drilling, production, and workovers, and these loads might cause buckling (bending stress) loads in uncemented intervals. In shallow normal-pressured wells, temperature will typically have a secondary effect on tubular design. In other situations, loads induced by temperature can be the governing criteria in the design.
Oilfield tubulars have been traditionally designed using a deterministic working stress design (WSD) approach, which is based on multipliers called safety factors (SFs). The primary role of a safety factor is to account for uncertainties in the design variables and parameters, primarily the load effect and the strength or resistance of the structure. While based on experience, these factors give no indication of the probability of failure of a given structure, as they do not explicitly consider the randomness of the design variables and parameters. Moreover, the safety factors tend to be rather conservative, and most limits of design are established using failure criteria based on elastic theory. Reliability-based approaches are probabilistic in nature and explicitly identify all the design variables and parameters that determine the load effect and strength of the structure.
Casing is the major structural component of a well. Casing is needed to maintain borehole stability, prevent contamination of water sands, isolate water from producing formations, and control well pressures during drilling, production, and workover operations. Casing provides locations for the installation of blowout preventers, wellhead equipment, production packers, and production tubing. The cost of casing is a major part of the overall well cost, so selection of casing size, grade, connectors, and setting depth is a primary engineering and economic consideration.
Most primary cement jobs are performed by pumping the slurry down the casing and up the annulus; however, modified techniques can be used for special situations. Conductor, surface, protection, and production strings are usually cemented by the single-stage method, which is performed by pumping cement slurry through the casing shoe and using top and bottom plugs. There are various types of heads for continuous cementing, as well as special adaptors for rotating or reciprocating casing. Stage-cementing tools, or differential valve (DV) tools, are used to cement multiple sections behind the same casing string, or to cement a critical long section in multistages. Stage cementing may reduce mud contamination and lessens the possibility of high filtrate loss or formation breakdown caused by high hydrostatic pressures, which is often a cause for lost circulation.
To evaluate a given casing design, a set of loads is necessary. Casing loads result from running the casing, cementing the casing, subsequent drilling operations, production and well workover operations. Internal pressure loads result from fluids within the casing and are modeled with pressure distributions. Pressure distributions are typically used to model the internal pressures. These pressure distributions are discussed next.
Remedial cementing requires as much technical, engineering, and operational experience, as primary cementing but is often done when wellbore conditions are unknown or out of control, and when wasted rig time and escalating costs force poor decisions and high risk. Squeeze cementing is a "correction" process that is usually only necessary to correct a problem in the wellbore. Before using a squeeze application, a series of decisions must be made to determine (1) if a problem exists, (2) the magnitude of the problem, (3) if squeeze cementing will correct it, (4) the risk factors present, and (5) if economics will support it. Most squeeze applications are unnecessary because they result from poor primary-cement-job evaluations or job diagnostics. Squeeze cementing is a dehydration process.
From a historic point of view, as jackup drilling vessels drilled in deeper water, the need to transfer the weight of the well to the seabed and provide a disconnect-and-reconnect capability became clearly beneficial. This series of hangers, called mudline suspension equipment, provides landing rings and shoulders to transfer the weight of each casing string to the conductor and the sea bed. Each mudline hanger landing shoulder and landing ring centralizes the hanger body, and establishes concentricity around the center line of the well. Concentricity is important when tying the well back to the surface. In addition, each hanger body stacks down relative to the previously installed hanger for washout efficiency.
The first design task in preparing the well plan is selecting depths that the casing will be run and cemented. The program results should allow the well to be drilled safely without the necessity of building "a steel monument" of casing strings. Unfortunately, many well plans give significant considerations to the actual pipe design, yet give only cursory attention to the pipe setting depth. The importance of selecting proper depths for setting casing cannot be overemphasized. Many wells have been engineering or economic failures because the casing program specified setting depths too shallow or deep. Applying a few basic drilling principles combined with a basic knowledge of the geological conditions in an area can help determine where casing strings should be set to ensure that drilling can proceed with minimum difficulty. Drilling environments often require several casing strings to reach the total desired depth. Figure 1 shows the relationship of some of these strings.
Having steered away from the congestion of the surface section, the main part of the well path through the overburden is specifically designed to put the well in the best possible position for penetrating the reservoir. There are three different overall shapes of the well, depending on the penetration requirements. In practice, these generic shapes will be modified by local conditions. Understanding the interaction between the 3D well trajectory and the formation stresses, particularly in overthrust areas, is vital to ensuring that the well can be drilled safely and efficiently. See Figure 1 for an illustration of these wellbores.