Use of a Non-Invasive, Non-Damaging Blocking Agent for Improved Cleaning in Low Bottomhole Pressure Wells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Solids removal from severely depleted wells remains a challenging intervention operation in the oil and gas industry. The various cleanout options that exist generally require significant expense, and may result in loss of potentially damaging fluids or permeability reduction to zones with low bottomhole pressures. This paper will focus on several field trials in South Texas utilizing a fluid-based, formation-blocking agent as part of the cleanout circulating fluid. The blocking agent has been in use for several years in cement spacer systems as a lost circulation material (LCM) with favorable results. The blocking agent uses a modified, hydrophobic polysaccharide to form micelles. Under differential pressure the micelles adsorb and realign in a layer along the formation or perforation tunnel forming an impermeable seal effectively blocking the loss of fluids to the formation. With the formation blocked, the solids can be circulated out using a higher density fluid and at higher circulation rates than the low-pressure reservoir would support. When the well is returned to an underbalanced system, the micelles will disperse, returning the fluid to its original state and restoring permeability to near a pre-intervention level. The case histories included in this paper are the first application of this material for well intervention operations outside a cement spacer application, and the results discussed show that the material performed remarkably well.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".