Off-Bottom Plug Placement: On the Effects of Pulling Out of the Hole

Abstract

Several cement plugs are often placed along cased oil and gas wells, commonly using the balanced-plug technique, to ensure proper abandonment. The placement process starts with the injection of cement slurry into wells that are otherwise filled with lighter wellbore fluids. The injector is pulled out of the hole when the cement slurry is levelled in the injection tube and the annular space between the injector and casing walls (from hereon referred to as POOH). Successful placement is achieved if the plug remains in place after the POOH. In our previous works, we investigated the hydrodynamics of the early stages of the balanced-plug method and provided a mechanistic description of the events that would lead to the accumulation of the injected fluid. In this work, we focus on the hydrodynamics of the final stage of the balanced-plug method. We study the impact of POOH on the lower interface of the injected cement layer. We develop a two-dimensional (2D) model that is representative of the process and conduct numerical simulations, using OpenFOAM, to explore the deformation of the lower interface of the cement plug at different POOH velocities and for different distances between the injector tip and the lower interface of the cement plug. We show that the injector pullout creates vortices at the injector tip, leaving a trail of vortices within the viscoplastic layer as the injector is pulled away from the interface. Our preliminary results suggest that the interface evolves approximately independently of the injector pullout when the initial distance between the injector and the bottom interface of the cement plug is sufficiently large. Here, the development of instabilities at the interface is reminiscent of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) irrespective of the pullout velocity. We show, however, that the injector pullout promotes the mixing of fluids when the interface is close to the injector initially. Reduced POOH velocity appears to enhance the mixing close to the interface.