SPE 114781 Sand Management: What Are We Sure Of? A.G. Slayter, SPE, M. Byrne, SPE, C.A. McPhee, SPE, P. McCurdy, SPE, Senergy Ltd Copyright 2008, Society of Petroleum Engineers This paper was prepared for presentation at the 2008 SPE Asia Pacific Oil & Gas Conference and Exhibition held in Perth, Australia, 20–22 October 2008. This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents of the paper have not been reviewed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and are subject to correction by the author(s). The material does not necessarily reflect any position of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, its officers, or members. Electronic reproduction, distribution, or storage of any part of this paper without the written consent of the Society of Petroleum Engineers is prohibited. Permission to reproduce in print is restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words illustrations may not be copied. The abstract must contain conspicuous acknowledgment of SPE copyright. Abstract Sand management is an issue pertinent to all those disciplines responsible for maturing a project. It requires leadership from the asset owner, expertise from the specialists and top quality equipment from the vendors. Excellence must span all the stages of field development for, like many aspects of well construction, “9 out of 10” is usually not good enough. For this reason guidance is proposed for management and design of sand related projects. While sanding prediction is the first step in the process, it is only briefly mentioned in this paper, where focus is more on selected design activities for an openhole production well with sand control, namely: • Rock mineralogy • Particle size distribution testing (sieve and laser) and the definition / issues relating to fines • Selection of sand control system with review of the screen to openhole annulus • Sand retention tests • Screen mesh size assessment • Screen failure mechanisms • Erosion • Collapse and/or buckling • Screen ratings, increasing screen strength where possible • Review of statistics Although many of the above are relevant to other well designs, no specific reference is made to frac and packs, selective or oriented perforation, sand consolidation, execution or operation of sand control, or surface sand management. The sand management team needs to define the tasks and activities to achieve established and shared objectives, those objectives being to achieve the required well productivity, longevity and functionality. Although these objectives are few, they can only be achieved through careful execution of the various tasks and associated activities. Many tasks are entwined between two or three objectives and need to be done in a particular order. This paper proposes a methodical workflow framework to achieve this. In many cases the answers to design questions are dispersed amoungst an unmanageable number of papers, manuals, guidelines, training and conference proceedings and this paper goes some way to draw the threads together for some of the common design issues. In some areas, work is still to be done by our industry to clarify equipment specification, standardising definitions, test methods, and modeling techniques. Introduction An Operator recently identified that 95 of their top 100 production wells were completed with sand control, some with a daily capacity of 60,000 BOPD or 350 million scf/D of gas. More than 1 million BOEPD was from reservoirs with risk of sand production (Balgobin, 2005). An increasing number of subsea fields are being developed where surface sand management and retrofit sand control is not usually an option.