Kick tolerances is an evaluation of how large kick sizes an open hole section can withstand without threatening the formation integrity at the shoe. If a certain kick size cannot be handled safely, the planned open hole section has to be shortened and the casing design has to be altered.Three model for calculating the kick tolerances in a well will be compared for a long and short open hole section for various BHA lengths.&nbsp; The kick tolerance will be performed probabilistically by use of MonteCarlo simulations where important input parameters are considered as distributions. The paper will focus on where the models differ in their results and discuss various opportunities and challenges with using a probabilistic approach.The models will be integrated in a MonteCarlo simulation framework where the major input uncertainties will be pore pressure, fracture pressure and initial gas distribution in the well. The output will a distribution of the casing pressure load that has to be compared to the fracture pressure distribution strength which results in a certain probability for fracturing for a given kick size. &nbsp;Only gas kick in water based mud will be considered.First a transient model based on the single bubble concept was considered and integrated in the MonteCarlo simulation framework. This was first compared against an analytical model which calculate the maximum casing shoe pressure at static shut in conditions. The analytical model takes into account uncertainty in the initial gas distribution. A transient flow model based on drift flux model was also considered. Both short and long open hole length was considered, BHA length was varied and different kick sizes were studied.The results show that the transient flow model provides the least conservative results but also the analytical model reduces the probability for fracturing compared to the single bubble model. In most cases, the max casing shoe pressure is achieved when kick is located at the BHA.This paper extends the application of methods for reliability based casing design to also include probabilistic kick tolerances. This is a contribution related to how the well design process can become more risk based. Some challenges related to specification of tolerance requirements, required number of MonteCarlo simulations and computing time will be discussed. It also provides an overview of the differences between the models and which parameters that are most important for the results.

Probabilistic Models for Kick Tolerance

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

OMAE 2021

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