Holistic Semiquantitative Approach for Process Safety Management Applied to Oil & Gas Wells

After several Process Safety incidents related to wells operations in the oil & gas industry, affecting people, environment and/or company reputation, well integrity engineering and barrier envelopes health it has turned into a critical concern for many operating companies, leading to the implementation of different kind of well integrity programs to continually reduce the number of events, ideally towards zero.

As defined by NORSOK D-010, Well Integrity is the “Application of technical, operational and organizational solutions to reduce risk of uncontrolled release of formation fluids throughout the life cycle of a well”. This is a multidisciplinary approach where well integrity engineers need to apply several process safety concepts and interact constantly with different disciplines to assess the status of barriers and barrier envelopes, being a very intensive time-consuming job, mainly during the extended and dynamic operations phase.

The big challenge raises when an organization expects to properly deploy a well integrity program at mature fields, where the required information is difficult and time consuming to get, where as in many cases the well count is too high and where the field resources for monitoring, tests and maintenance activities are limited.

Therefore, some “critical well” identification methodology becomes key to ensure that the organization is focusing in the hot spots rather than in wells that represents low or neglectable risks, to ensure a realistic and effective well integrity program.

To face the challenge, in alignment with the Company Operating Management Model and aiming the Operational Excellence, the Pan American Energy Well Integrity Team has developed:

1.- A holistic risk-based methodology to screen and identify the most critical out of more than 6000 active Oil & Gas wells across several operated assets located in Argentina.

2.- Digital tools to automatize critical wells identification and facilitate well integrity condition monitoring.

3.- Multidisciplinary workflows and procedures to plan and execute field activities related to risk reduction measures.

4.- Specific risk evaluation process for unconventional wells being at risk to receive subsurface interference during fracking operation (known as frac hit).

Hence, the purpose of this work is to share with the Process Safety community the ongoing efforts to implement a Well Integrity Management System (WIMS) in an effective way and considering all the Process Safety concepts that apply in this matter.