Balance to succeed, a case of Cement Plugs in losses situation

During my time in Mexico, one of the main challenges was severe loss circulation. In new wells due to the presence of fractured carbonates and low formation pressure (LPHT) several actions were usually in place, like managed pressure cementing (cementing taking advantaged of MPD equipment/practices), use of foamed or nitrified fluids and high performance lightweight cement.

In old wells, remedial cementing was particularly a challenge due to the inability of wells to maintain fluid level to surface, even with water-like brines. I remember the sole task of abandoning an unnecessary perforated section or curing a casing leak required several operations and time. Again several techniques formed part of our solutions repertoire, including nitrogen, nitrified fluids/gels, high performance LCM, special cement systems, etc.

Placing cement plugs was particularly tricky and please forget about even mentioning the “balanced cement plug method”. As you can understand with the fluid level below surface (sometimes as deep as 3000m) there can’t be any balancing of the cement in the wellbore. Instead, I learned a practice developed locally called the “actual hydrostatic balance”.

In this plug-placement methodology, the wellbore hydrostatic column after cement placement equalizes the formation pressure at the losses zone. The practice required knowledge of the static fluid level before cementing (the point at which there was no losses) to be able to estimate the formation pressure at the losses zone; then acknowledging the losses occurring while cementing the cement is under-displaced to avoid putting more hydrostatic weight on top. In other words, replacing control fluid by cement leading to a deeper fluid level after cementing allowing the cement to remain in the wellbore. Graphically the following picture describes this cement plug placement methodology.

For obvious reasons after the cement plug was placed and the working string was POOH slowly above the TOC, it was required to WOC sufficiently to allow the cement to develop at least sufficient gel strength before attempting to fill the hole.

This concept, even if simplistic, proved to be a great resource to increase the success rate of cement plugs in underbalance conditions.

If you have any comments or questions, please let me know in the dedicated space below
Cheers

L. Diaz