Anatomy of a Proactive Well Servicing Regimen : Introduction

I have always found well servicing to be one of, if not the most important items when running a successful oil and gas company. One of the biggest opex drivers in the oilfield is your well servicing expenses. Every time you have to move a rig onto a well, it impacts your operating expenses significantly. All too often, the equipment is replaced in kind over and over again without making any changes and the same failures occur.

That is why it is so important to utilize a PROACTIVE approach, which looks at the long term picture (past, present and future), and focuses on extending the run life of the well. After all, it can be more expensive to conduct another workover in 6 months than it is to replace all of the tubing, rods and pump right now. (**Disclaimer... I'm not advertising that you should replace everything every workover, just stressing the importance of run life!!)

This is the first entry in a series, regarding a proactive well servicing regimen. While coordinating rigs for a producer in Alberta, I spent alot of time continuously tweaking my methods in order to provide the most effective system. Some of the most important factors to consider when approaching well interventions include:

Job Type

Well History / Review

Failure Type / Equipment Selection

Timeline tracking

Prioritization

Run time to failure (repeat failures)

$$'s

It is important to understand each of these categories and how they affect the big picture.

Of equal importance is developing a method of tracking each of these categories. This will allow you to not only trend the individual wells, but the entire program as a whole to see how your proactive efforts are decreasing workover expenses over time. During my tenure as well servicing coordinator, I developed a spreadsheet tracking all of these data points. This provided everything I needed to monitor and trend the process. I would provide monthly reviews to operations and management for accruals and forecasting purposes.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will break down each group individually and describe how to track each one. Follow along in my blog, to see how to develop a proactive well servicing regimen.

If you'd like to discuss my proactive approach to well servicing further, please contact me at (403)391-3758 or kalcyhthomas@gmail.com.

Cheers, Kalcy