Well Management: Top Tier Well Approach

Effective well management and reliability are fundamental to ensuring high well production uptime with the attendant benefit of minimizing unscheduled volume loss. Well equipment reliability is impacted by the scope and frequency of preventive maintenance (PM) in place. The optimum PM frequency is one that maximizes incremental value with reduced equipment failures. While defining the PM program, due consideration must be given to the well risk (business and safety) which impacts consequence level of failures. In matured assets with high well counts, PM programs should be structured to maximize uptime of wells with significant volume contribution, critical gas producers to support gas lift systems and injectors while also minimizing process safety risk on all wells. These wells are referred to as top tier wells. This paper defines criteria for selecting top tier wells. It also focuses on using a Prevent-Detect- Respond-Recover (PDRR) approach in defining a well equipment PM program that meets industry and local regulatory requirements to drive improved reliability of the top tier wells. Prevent-Detect initiatives leverage Root-Cause-Failure-Analysis (RCFA) data to minimize the likelihood of equipment failure, and by extension, provide a focused surveillance system to ensure failures are detected before equipment are taken out of service. Whereas Respond-Recover initiatives provide a defined response plan to well equipment reliability issues through low complexity intervention actions and subsequent detailed repairs to correct detected failures with minimal downtime impact. The benefit of a top tier approach to PM is to drive incremental business benefit for the asset through optimization of existing resources.