HORIZONTAL/EXTENDED REACH DRILLING

Fishing operations in horizontal & extended-reach wells

Computerized jar placement extends fishing to lateral positions Steve Williamson, Bill Reeves Bowen Tools (IRI International)
Fishing has changed substantially since the days of cable tool drilling, when drillers would routinely lower a device similar to a barbed fish hook downhole, to retrieve cable that had parted. In today's horizontal and extended-reach wells, every fishing application is unique and requires the use of computer modeling in addition to practical considerations such as hole conditions, how the fish is stuck, and limitations of the drillstring and hoisting equipment. Even so, the reasons for fishing remain much the same as they are for more conventional wells. This includes: Freeing stuck drillstrings/production tubing Retrieving broken or lost tools (and now, mud motors and MWD's) Pulling packers/plugs

Repairing casing In most cases, the same fishing tools used in conventional wellbores can be used successfully in horizontal and extended-reach wells. For example, overshots continue to be effective for catching outer diameters of fished tools or equipment, and spears continue to be used to catch inner diameters. The main differences are in the design of the drilling or fishing strings used to convey the tools to the fish, and in jar placement. Friction is high in horizontal and extended-reach wells. This greatly affects axial and torsional loads along the drillstring. Additionally, in high-angle holes, the beneficial effect of gravity to push the drillstring to bottom is partially or totally negated. To compensate for these factors, inverted drillstrings are often used. In the inverted drillstring, weight members, such as drill collars and heavyweight drillpipe, are kept in the vertical sections of the hole, far from their conventional position, immediately above the bit. In the vertical position, weight members are effective in pushing the lower drillpipe sections to bottom. This is allowed because drillpipe in the curved and high-angle portions of the well can withstand large compressive loads without buckling (Figure1) schematically depicts an inverted drillstring.

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Role of jars
Hydraulic jars are used to impart impact loads to free tools or equipment that need to be fished. Their effective use requires a thorough understanding of the drillstring and its interaction with the wellbore, as their operation depends primarily on exploiting axial loads from, and elastic energy (stretch) of, the drillstring. Jars work by delaying release of pull loads until after the fishing string has undergone its stretch, thus providing sudden impact instead of gradual force to pry the fish free. To move a fish, the jarring force, or impact load, must exceed the sticking force. How far the fish moves depends on the duration of the impact load.

The combined effect of impact load and duration is called impulse (Figure2) shows impact and impulse). Optimum jar placement occurs with the largest impulse for an impact load greater than the sticking force. The effectiveness of fishing jars, then, depends not only on their design, but also on their placement in the drillstring relative to the attachment to the fish and to the other components of the string.

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Jar placement
The difference in performance between jars that are properly placed and those that are improperly placed can be a factor of as much as 3 to 4. Historical rules of thumb for jar placement can often lead to poor jar placement. This is especially true for horizontal and extended-reach wells. Instead, a computer program is required to precisely determine optimum jar placement. The program must take into account hole angle and curvature, friction, and drillstring design. It must also account for impact and impulse. Bowen's fishing and drilling jar placement programs base impact and impulse calculations on stress wave theory, which is also used to model the collision of solids, water hammer in piping, and other cases where loading occurs in a very short time frame. The energy for jarring comes from the spring effect of the drillstring (and jar intensifier TM) when it is either stretched or compressed. When the jar trips; however, the sudden release of the energy does not instantaneously go to the stuck point. Rather, the energy is transmitted by stress waves which travel at the speed of sound in metal (Figure 3) shows the basic equation for the stress wave). Though the equation is simple, three additional factors can further complicate the energy transmission: Stress waves are partially transmitted and partially reflected at any change in drillstring cross section (Figure 4) Friction between the drill string and hole acts to dissipate the stress wave's energy. Sometimes moving the jar only a few feet up or down in the fishing string can drastically change how the stress waves add together to create the jarring force on the stuck point (Figure 5) shows an example of how jar placement affects impact and impulse in a particular horizontal well).

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To account for all of the factors, the Bowen placement program uses stress wave analysis techniques to track all stress waves. It also allows for an unlimited number of section changes, which enables modeling of virtually any drillstring and bottomhole assembly.

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Placement guidelines
Having said that each fishing application is unique, there are certain practical guidelines pertaining to jar placement in horizontal and extended-reach wellbores:

In hole curvatures of 15/100 ft or greater, it is usually best to avoid operating the jar in the curve because bending stresses due to the curvature, combined with axial stresses, can severely shorten the life of the jar. If jars are located below the curve in a medium-radius hole, consideration must be given to whether adequate pull (or push) loads can be transmitted to the jar. As much as 50% of axial loads can be lost to friction in the curve. When jars are located above the curve, the magnitude of the stress waves are reduced by friction as they travel to the stuck point. However, good impact loads can be achieved, even with very long horizontal extensions below the curve. It has been found that in an inverted drillstring jars are more effective when located in the heavyweight drillpipe rather than in the drill collars. The reason for this is that the stress waves are reflected to a higher degree when going through a cross section change of large to small than when going from small to large. When placing drilling jars, it is important to anticipate where the string is likely to become stuck. In some cases, it is optimum to have the jar at one location for jarring up and another location for jarring down. A jar that can allow separation of its up and down sections is ideal.

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In other cases, where there may be a likely sticking spot far below the curve and in an uncased curved section of the hole, it may be found useful to have two complete jars (up and down sections) in the drillstring. One jar may be required below the curve in the bottomhole assembly nearer to the bit, and another jar may be required above the non-cased curved section of the hole. For such cases, special operation of the jars is required to avoid firing both jars at one time, which would severely damage the tools.

Case study
An operator with a horizontal well with a kickoff point at approximately 8,000 ft, built angle at 1012/100 ft to 90 of hole angle. Casing was run to the bottom of the curve. Drilling of the horizontal section proceeded only 300 ft before becoming stuck at the mud motor. Initial thinking was to back off in the drillpipe in the vertical portion of the well and begin jarring with drill collars located between the jars and jar intensifiers. However, the jar placement program showed that results for delivering impact at the stuck mud motor with the planned scheme would be poor (impact loads only slightly greater than the pull load at the jar.) An alternate scheme was run by computer simulation, placing the fishing assembly in the casing near the bottom of the curve. Heavyweight drillpipe was placed between the jar and the jar intensifier. The results showed that the impact loads increased by a factor of four. The operator chose to follow this alternate scheme. After backoff, with two joints of drillpipe inside the casing, the fishing assembly was run in the hole, and the fish was engaged. Jarring operations began with 50,000-60,000 lb jarring loads, which was later increased to 80,000-90,000 lb, just before the fish came free.

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Next steps
Technological advances such as the computerized jar placement program described here have done much to improve fishing operations in horizontal and extended-reach wells. Efforts are also under way to further improve fishing tools and techniques for these applications. An example is the fishing of mud motors, wherein the tool's hardcoated rotor is left exposed in the hole. Some hardcoatings are too hard to allow an overshot to adequately latch onto it. One solution is to use custom overshot extensions designed to pass through the medium radius curve, yet allow the overshot to swallow the rotor and catch on the motor housing below. For situations where hole constraints make it impractical or impossible to catch the motor body, the authors suggest the use of mud motors which provide an area on the uphole end of the rotor, for fishing recovery. In some horizontal and extended-reach applications, the frictional drag may be so great that one can only get to bottom by continuous drillstring rotation. Though not currently available, future fishing tools and techniques will allow latching and unlatching a fish even under these conditions. Advancements such as these provide support for drilling and workover operations that is crucial as the oil and gas industry continues to push the envelope in horizontal technology