Abstract:
In the coming decade, more than 1000 offshore wells are expected to be permanently Plugged and Abandonned (P&Aed) on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, leading to huge financial costs for the operating companies and the Norwegian state. In this context, the research center SWIPA was launched in 2020 to develop new methods allowing cost reduction of PA.
In this presentation, I will present some of the industrial challenges in P&A, and described how they are addressed in SWIPA. I will present three laboratory setups aiming to reproduce, as closely as possible, the well conditions. Each of them is used to performed experiments where we investigate the formation of leakage paths in well barrier materials (often cement), test different techniques to evaluate the risk of leakage or test and compare different barrier materials.
Short bio:
In my PhD in Navier, I studied cement foams, i.e. cement containing gas bubbles. My main focus was to understand how to avoid bubbles coarsening before the setting of the cement paste, by tuning the rheological properties of the cement paste. In 2019, I started a postdoc in the University of Oslo on particle and bubble migration in emulsions. Since October 2021, I am working as a research scientist at SINTEF, a Norwegian industrial research laboratory, where I work on diverse projects related to materials for deep wells (Oil & Gas, CO2 storage and Geothermy). This includes experiments on cement integrity when exposed to temperature cycles, pressure cycles or corrosive environment. Another major topic is the study of drilling fluids for CO2 storage.
