Reliability and Safety Engineering
Risk Model for CCS and Hydrogen wells operations
- Client
- Major oil&gas operator
- Country
- Italy
- Year
- 2021
- Industry
- Oil & Gas
- Service
- Reliability and Safety
For a major oil and gas operator, kwantis built a model of well barrier degradation to measure the probability of integrity loss in legacy and new wells used for hydrogen and CO2 storage, injection and production.
The challenge
In a global setting focused on energy demand growth and emissions reduction, attention to asset reliability is one of the main drivers. Operators need to know how likely their wells are to lose integrity across a wide set of well operations.
Our approach
kwantis developed a specialized model to assess the risk of well barrier degradation, so that it can be included in the probability and consequences of a blowout event.
The risk of material failure is split into two parts, cements and tubular materials. Each has its own model, which considers the corrosive environments that can be found inside the well:
- Tubular materials: the risk is calculated from the material composition (e.g. chromium content) and the well parameters (e.g. H2S concentration), under either sour or sweet service conditions.
- Cements: an energetic approach estimates the risk of cement carbonation and consequent failure, based on the material conditions (e.g. cement density) and the well parameters (e.g. CO2 concentration).
The outcome
Included in the blowout event probability, the model gives a more detailed and complete description of the degradation phenomena. These estimates are currently used to answer whether legacy wells can be converted to CCS and H2 operations.
