First Worldwide Development and Deployment of a Uniquely Designed Blowout Stopper

With the increasing challenges in gas well interventions, especially with the need to intervene in wells with extreme sour gases called "high and ultra-high H2S wells," it became vital to have improved safety standards; including, but not limited to, pressure control equipment (PCE). Also, it became necessary to add an extra barrier to shear and seal under any conditions to safeguard against the risk of such toxic release. This improvement and new additional capability have been achieved by developing and successfully deploying a new technology for high risk completion and intervention applications. This new blowout stopper is an electrically initiated, pyro-mechanical gate valve that performs the critical function of shearing and sealing during drilling, completions and intervention operations. It may be added to the stack or retrofitted to an existing blowout preventer (BOP) cavity. The new BOP is designed to shear anything above the bit and seal instantly even after full flow has been established, with the ability to instantly and reliably stop the release of toxic sour gas regardless of what may be across the BOP. This technology is considered the industry's first true blowout "stopper," as opposed to current "preventers." The working components of this BOP are isolated from the wellbore fluids before activation to provide unmatched component integrity. In an emergency, such as a work string bottom-hole assembly (BHA) stuck across the BOP, it can shear anything and seal instantly to avert a potentially devastating release of toxic sour gas. This technology has gone through an extensive qualification program on an international scale. This program was designed to satisfy well control manual requirements, API 16A PR2 and DNVGL-OS-E101. All applicable tests were witnessed and approved by oil and gas well intervention specialists in both the field and yard tests. This paper will describe the technology in greater detail, and talk about the qualification program, including the yard test and first worldwide field trial testing.