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The effects of well damage and completion designs on geoelectrical responses in mature wellbore environments

Journal Article · · Geophysics
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [3];  [4]
  1. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
  2. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States); Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM (United States)
  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
  4. GroundMetrics, Inc., San Diego, CA (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations

Well integrity is one of the major concerns in long-term geologic storage sites due to the potential risk of well leakage and groundwater contamination. Evaluating changes in electrical responses due to energized steel-cased wells has the potential to quantify and predict possible wellbore failures because any kind of breakage or corrosion along highly conductive well casings will have an impact on the distribution of the subsurface electrical potential. However, realistic wellbore-geoelectrical models that can fully capture fine-scale details of well completion design and the state of well damage at the field scale require extensive computational effort, or they can even be intractable to simulate. To overcome this computational burden while still keeping the model realistic, we have used the hierarchical finite-element method that represents electrical conductivity at each dimensional component (1D edges, 2D planes, and 3D cells) of a tetrahedral mesh. This allows well completion designs with real-life geometric scales and well systems with realistic, detailed, progressive corrosion and damage in our models. We have developed a comparison of possible discretization approaches of a multicasing completion design in the finite-element model. The effects of the surface casing and the coupling between concentric well casings as well as the effects of the degree and the location of well damage on the electrical responses are also examined. As a result, we analyze real surface electric field data to detect wellbore integrity failure associated with damage.

Research Organization:
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Geothermal Technologies Office
Grant/Contract Number:
NA0003525; AC02-05CH11231
OSTI ID:
1822221
Report Number(s):
SAND--2021-7525J; 696952
Journal Information:
Geophysics, Journal Name: Geophysics Journal Issue: 6 Vol. 86; ISSN 0016-8033
Publisher:
Society of Exploration GeophysicistsCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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58 GEOSCIENCES