What’s a well intervention?

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Well service involves altering, managing, or diagnosing the health of an oil or gas well. Well intervention can help maintain peak operating conditions and address specific concerns. Examples include pumping and workover. Routine maintenance and tests can improve productivity. Subsea well intervention is important for offshore operations.

Well service, or well work, includes operations performed on an oil or gas well to alter, manage, or diagnose the health of the well. At any stage of the oil or gas well’s productive life, well servicing can be used to help maintain peak operating conditions. There are various types of well repairs, each intended to address specific concerns of a particular well.

When an oil or gas well is young, for example, it can be beneficial to manage its pressure and flow by adding equipment or otherwise altering the existing well. In such a case, well intervention may be required to safely and effectively implement the desired modifications and manage or increase well production. Older oil or gas wells may require periodic cleaning or other maintenance, and well intervention is also often used for this type of management strategy.

An example of well intervention is known as pumping, where chemicals are pumped into the well to encourage resource production or clean up extraction byproducts. Another important type of intervention is the workover. Sometimes, so many parts of an oil or gas well need to be replaced at once that the entire operation, or a significant portion of it, needs to be replaced. This is a potentially important aspect of underwater drilling, which can be considered more risky and costly than drilling on land.

Equipment and wells will likely change during the operating life of wells, so it may be necessary to manage flow and equipment within a well. Wellhead maintenance, for example, usually involves executing a variety of intervention strategies such as routine maintenance and performing scheduled procedures on the wellhead. Other concerns that may require wellhead maintenance may include removing unwanted water, encouraging resource production, and removing extraction byproducts.

In addition to routine maintenance, various tests are often required for running a well. These tests can increase understanding of oil or gas flow, observe geological features, and generally help crews get a good understanding of health. In general, these tests and management strategies are usually aimed at improving productivity of the well at any stage of its life.

Dwindling land-based oil reserves have increased the importance of subsea well intervention, which occurs in offshore oil and gas well operations. Like many other types of wells, subsea operations are usually intended to maintain or improve productivity. Many problems associated with subsea drilling, such as excess water and sand particles, can be managed by subsea well drilling.




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