Publications

For deep sea developments, it is important to obtain the information of subsea flowing temperature for engineering studies. Higher confidence in tubing head flowing temperature estimates results in the optimum selections of subsea production designs such as corrosion managements and material selections at early stage of the studies. An objective of this paper is to present actual temperature records measured at SubSea Test Tree (SSTT) flowing wellbore and matching results by temperature modeling. INPEX Masela drilled several wells for the appraisal of Abadi gas field located within the Masela Block in the Arafura Sea. Since Abadi gas field contains approximately 10mol% of carbon dioxide, high quality information of flowing temperature at seabed levels is mandatory for the proper selection of corrosion management strategy in engineering phase. For this purposes, INPEX Masela, Ltd (INPEX) measured temperature at a SSTT location during two drill stem tests (DSTs) in wells of “Abadi-X and “Abadi-Y. In addition to the SSTT location, temperatures were measured in bottomhole locations at packer and Pressure Controlled Tester valve (PCT) depths. By matching those observed temperature records with the simulated results by an in-house software, overall U-value and near wellbore heat affected zone by drilling and completion operations were estimated. The in-house software is a customized temperature model based on a discretetized heat transfer equation. This model can assign any initial temperature distribution in the formation as matching parameters. Matching results show the obtained U-value is larger than that estimated from geological information and the heat-affected zone is spreading up to several meters from the wellbore. By obtaining important temperature information including SSTT wellbore during the DSTs, then analyzing this information enable it possible to optimize our corrosion management strategy and arrival temperature estimates at our floating LNG facility at the early stage of the engineering.