How Much of Your Centralizer Is Left After Exiting a Casing Window in an Extended-Reach Horizontal Multilateral?

Viscous oil in the West Sak field on the North Slope of Alaska is being developed with extended-reach multilateral wells, with departure/depth ratios up to 5:1, in which slotted liners are tied back to the main wellbore with a Technology Advancement of Multilaterals (TAML) Level-3 junction system. Centralizers are necessary on the slotted liners to avoid slot plugging, reduce drag, and limit differential sticking. After three failures, a testing program was conducted on several common centralizers.

View a Synopsis of SPE 105766 as published in JPT.

This article, written by Technology Editor Dennis Denney, contains highlights of paper SPE 105766, “How Much Is Left of Your Centralizer After Exiting a Casing Window in an Extended-Reach Horizontal Multilateral? Modeling, Yard Tests, and Field Results From Alaska’s West Sak Development,” by E.M. Peterson, SPE, M.R. Greener, SPE, and E.R. Davis, SPE, ConocoPhillips, and D.T. Craig, Baker Oil Tools, prepared for the 2007 SPE/IADC Drilling Conference, Amsterdam, 20–22 February.

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