ABSTRACT:Setting a cement plug on the target zone either creates a solid seal to stop fluid movement or provides a kick-off point for sidetrack drilling operations. Successfully placing cement plugs is one of most critical steps to ensure trouble free completion, reduce the risk of lost of circulation, isolate pressure zones and enhance wellbore integrity.The traditional method is to pump all the fluids until each fluid level is equal to that inside the string. The limitation to this method is that the fluid could be contaminated once the string is pulled out of the hole due to variable fluid densities as well as wellbore and work string sizes. Thus, the volume of spacers pumped ahead and behind the cement and the volume of displacement are critical to the quality of the cement plug.A computer program is developed to model the displacement hydraulics of fluids and simulate fluids contamination during pulling pipe out of hole. The computer modeling aids in optimizing the pumping schedule to ensure balanced slurry and spacer levels after POOH (Pull out of the hole), minimizing contamination within the cement slurry and spacer, ultimately, reducing the risk of loss of circulation and enhancing wellbore integrity.

Using Computer Simulations to Aid the Analysis of Fluid Contaminations During Cement Plug Placement

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/OMAE/OMAE2021/volume/85116

OMAE 2021

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.