Wellbore Stability Analysis and Well Design Services

Wellbore instability while drilling can take many familiar forms such as stuck pipe, hole squeezing, lost circulation, severely-enlarged hole or difficult directional control. Some related problems can arise when these wells are finally drilled to target, including uncertain formation evaluation, poor cementing, casing deformations, and ineffective perforating. These issues cost the world-wide industry several billions of dollars a year in downtime, well construction costs, and lost production.

Weatherford Geomechanics Services specializes in the evaluation, analysis and practical well engineering aspects of all types of wellbore instability, including tectonically-stressed brittle shales, smectite-rich shales, poorly-cemented sandstones and fractured carbonates. We provide our clients with best-in-class capabilities using our advanced software and proprietary analysis techniques developed over many years of consulting and research on this subject.

We have conducted more than 250 wellbore stability assessments in many countries around the globe for such clients as:

We have a wide range of experience in the topic including such
aspects as:

• Openhole or barefoot completions
• Underbalanced and managed pressure drilling
• Well design for partially-depleted reservoirs
• Lost circulation problems in fractured formations
• Permafrost and gas hydrates
• Drilling fluids optimization in reactive shales
• Area drilling performance studies

Our commercial well planning software, STABView™ is our preferred tool for stability evaluations, and has been used in our consulting projects for over 10 years.  We also have available several commercial finite-element, finite-difference, and discrete-element models for more complex problems. Multi-phase flow modeling software is available for coupled wellbore stability-hydraulics simulation for underbalanced drilling. Our staff are highly skilled in deriving the maximum value from offset well data, wireline and LWD logs and laboratory test data.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have a wellbore stability problem and could use our expertise. We would be pleased to offer our services to assist you in developing an optimal well design for maximum productivity and avoid unnecessary downtime.