Development and implementation of an online integrated well integrity and risk assessment management process for onshore gas wells

Well integrity is a critical component of safe and sustainable onshore gas production. A thorough understanding is required of the risks that can cause undesirable events such as loss of containment, human and environmental safety hazards, and loss of production for the successful management of well integrity. Specifically, well integrity entail the application of technical, operational and organizational solutions to reduce the risk of uncontrolled releases of hazardous substances and well fluids throughout the life cycle of the well. In this paper, we present the development of an online integrated well integrity and risk assessment process (WIRAP) for managing well integrity across the life cycle of the well. The online application integrates various well integrity and risk assessment methods, including fault tree and well barrier analysis, reliability modeling, online process modeling, consequence modeling and final risk assessment. The online application is built on data from physical well head inspections and real time data from the plant historian to perform model scoring and predictive analytics for early fault detection and diagnostic analysis. The application provides the capability of identifying high-risk wells through statistical comparisons based on probabilistic modeling and well health indices. It is shown how the online WIRAP methodology is implemented throughout the company for in-time decision making by operations and management.

Keywords: Online web-based platform, onshore gas wells, risk assessment, well integrity.