Publications

Hydrocarbon migration after cementing is a troublesome issue which is usually faced during well construction process. The problem will be more complicated if it is happened on surface section where there is no dedicated secondary surface barrier to prevent hydrocarbon leaking to surface. Hydrocarbon migration, especially gas, often encountered after cementing which may be driven by several factors such as improper cement design, inappropriate cementing practices and loss circulation problem. It is highly important to ensure successful primary cementing as remedial cementing produced high cost and may worsen structural integrity of the well. When primary cementing jobs are conducted in a shallow well, the risk of having hydrocarbon migration post-cementing is increase. At shallow well, the cement column length is limited, and the temperature is relatively low which elevate the challenge to design a good cement slurry especially during cement transition periods. Inconsistent cement slurry mixing also may contribute to bad cementing result. Existing practices that have been implemented to mitigate hydrocarbon migration after cementing is by referring to common industrial cementing guideline. However, by applying those, still unable to guarantee reliable primary cementing jobs. More robust method is highly required to enable better cementing job success rate. To address this complexity, new method of cementing design and practices was applied. The new strategy covers new temperature reference for cement slurry design, optimizing the key cement properties beyond common standard and enable homogenous cement slurry property which is pumped into the well. This implementation has proved to provide better cementing result for the drilling campaign in the area with no hydrocarbon migration after primary cementing.