Revolutionary Pickling Fluid

With oil prices today, sitting exactly where they were in 1988 when I graduated from college, operators are once again struggling to implement plans which will hopefully carry them and their assets to better times. In a world of near negative oil prices, lease operating expenses (LOE) eclipse production revenue. If your company hasn't implemented and properly managed commodity hedging, chances are that your organization is burning through cash faster than it is coming in. What strategy do you implement at a time like this to preserve your surface and downhole hardware so that when it comes time to turn everything back on, you aren't then faced with unbearable workover and repair expenses?

With wellbore fluid movement ceasing when wells are shut in, many issues which eventually cause production problems are no longer primary issues. Paraffin, asphaltene, salt and scale deposition slows tremendously because oil & brine are not continually bringing damaging material from producing formations to the wellbore where pressure, temperature or chemical changes initiate precipitation. With those issue put at bay, corrosion becomes the primary damage mechanism facing operators.

At the macro level, a shut in well looks like it has a near-static downhole environment with minimal changes in pressure, temperature and fluid mobility. At the micro level though, there is still a lot going that operators have to worry about. Naturally occurring gases such as CO2, O2 or H2S are at work causing steel embrittlement or corrosion. Sulfate Reducing Bacteria (SRB's) will continue to multiply and add to a well's H2S problems causing further corrosion issues. Then you have to look at the electrical circuit that exists between the wellbore tubulars and the earth. If not properly equipped with cathodic protection or insulated, a well can be in a situation where metal is removed at an alarming rate.

The traditional procedure to protect wells from corrosion would be to introduce some sort of corrosion inhibitor or oxygen scavenger in an attempt to minimize the impact of downhole gases & bacteria on casing and tubing. These products will impact the ion exchange in wellbore fluids to shut down the movement of iron. The previously mentioned cathodic protection can also be used so that sacrificial anodes will corrode rather than your multi-million dollar completion strings. But what if there were a different approach that could both impact completion hardware corrosion and treat the near-wellbore pore space so that when you turn your wells back on, they are optimized and will come back at higher than normal production rates?

SURGITECH's NanoSLICK product is a solution of nano-particles which will attach to both metals and the rock itself. In the wellbore, the charged particles attach to the steel casing, tubing and rods and leave an insulating silica layer which prevents metals from interacting with the chemistry in the water phase. Particles in the product will form a covalent bond with most metal ions in brine, rendering them insoluble. The glass-like, insulating layer, will also reduce anodic corrosion. At the same time, any un-reacted or "live" particles will continue to seek a neutral energy state by moving into the pore space where they will react with the rock. As the particles bond to the rock, they alter the rock wettability so that fluids and gasses can move through the pore space with less resistance. With this two-fold effect, you get the best of both worlds. Tubulars are protected and your near wellbore pore space is souped up so that wells can be brought back online with superior production results. You can both protect your asset and increase it's future performance without having to pull the completion and perform an expensive workover.

While SURGITECH has used this product on hundreds of oil wells, we recently started using the product on gas wells where it is used to rapidly remove water which is trapped due to capillary forces. In many gas wells this trapped water is the primary skin damage mechanism holding back gas production. The graphic below illustrates the performance impact of this product. The well was treated and shed almost 100% of the treatment fluid in a few days, then started shedding water at a rate that was at a minimum, 600-800% higher than before the treatment. This 24 year old well, exhibited an almost 300% increase in gas production as a result. We see similar effects with oil wells, where initially water is shed from the pore space at a high rate and at the same time oil rates increase. After the water shedding phase, water cut will drop but the oil cut will remain high. The increase in oil cut may continue for 6 months or more.

How is the product deployed and what does it cost? The product can be blended onsite from a concentrate in tanker volumes and then either be gravity fed or pumped into the annulus of most wells with a trash pump. For smaller well counts, the product can be pumped from totes on a truck or trailer. Once introduced to the annulus, the well's existing pump is utilized to circulate the fluid up through the tubing and then back into the annulus where it can coat the casing and tubing. After circulating a well for a few hours, the well can be shut in and the remaining nano-particles will begin to work on the formation. Surface equipment can be treated by circulating the product with a trash pump or a portion of the fluid introduced to the wellbore could be pumped to surface and into the flowlines to pickle the surface system. Cost will of course vary with volume, but tubulars on vertical wells can be treated with just a couple of hundred gallons of NanoSLICK at a cost of $350/well. Larger volumes of product can be spec'd to allow for wells with long perforated intervals where there is a greater interest in the formation stimulation side of the equation. Undiluted, the product is a base with a PH of 12.5-13.0. At deployment concentrations, the product will slightly raise the PH of the existing brine/water.

NanoSLICK Pickling Fluid offers a unique, low cost solution for operators looking for a way to keep their wells in top shape during this downturn.

Glenn R. McColpin, CEO

SURGITECH INC

[email protected]

Cell: 713-201-1396