Technology Focus: Sand Management (October 2024)
Authors: Mahmoudi Mahdi 
Published: October 2024

With the resurgence of drilling activities post-COVID-19, there is a growing interest in refining existing technologies and exploring new ones to discover cost-effective and reliable solutions for developing aged and more-challenging new reservoirs.

Although approaches may vary slightly depending on the unique characteristics of reservoirs in different regions, the general trends are conceptually similar. Drilling longer wells, increasing the number of fracture stages, and completing multiple zones in complex stacked reservoirs, along with optimizing multilateral wells with sand control to enable long laterals in stacked reservoirs, have emerged as key focuses of the industry.

Drilling longer wells introduces several challenges, including managing installation loads, ensuring proper wellbore cleanout, and ultimately producing effectively and uniformly from extended laterals that drill through heterogeneous reservoirs with varying sand facies. While liner flotation is effective in reducing installation loads and improving wellbore cleaning, it presents challenges when used in conjunction with conventional sand-control screens.

Sand control and flow control are becoming more integrated to offer solutions for effective production from longer laterals. Flow segmentation helps prevent premature failures caused by gas or water breakthroughs or localized high rates causing erosion. Paper SPE 218074 is a good example of using flow-control devices to enhance the reliability and longevity of sand-control systems.

Stacked reservoirs have always posed challenges in terms of zonal isolation and sand-control design. Higher fines content and silty sand with complex reservoir conditions leads to less interest in standalone screens because of the high risk of plugging and failure in such developments. Even though gravel packing is effective, it poses several technical and implementation challenges. The complexity of sandface completion, with varying sand sizes, pressures, and fluid properties, makes these wells particularly difficult to complete. Paper SPE 214914 offers a good case study of such a complex completion successfully implemented in the field.

Despite all this, the fundamentals of screen design and implementation remain the same. Screen plugging remains one of the major challenges in the sand-control industry. Rigorous testing of sand-control media to verify retention properties, erosional resistance, integrity requirements for the installation-loading and lifelong-loading scenarios, and plugging resistance are critical aspects of any sand-control qualification. I strongly recommend reading paper IPTC 23690 for a detailed understanding of the screen-qualification process and the design of screens for target sand facies.

Also, it is crucial to remember that no screen is completely immune to plugging. The unintended consequences of a change in drilling/completion fluid or cleanout process could lead to screen plugging. It is always important to test and validate the effect of any change in fluids or completion practices on sand-control performance.

Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.

SPE 215070 A Comprehensive Review of Screen Plugging During Openhole Sand-Control Completions Installation: Causes, Consequences, and Best Practices by Maye Beldongar, SLB, et al.

SPE 214934 Shunted Gravel-Pack Failures and How To Prevent Them by Carolina Latini, DuneFront, et al.

SPE 215411 Performance of Bonded Bead Sand Screen as Remedial Sand Control in Highly Erosive Environment by Ashvin Avalani Chandrakant, Petronas, et al.