Successful Management of Wellbore Stability to Mitigate Stuck Pipe Incidents in a Brownfield Development Drilling Campaign: A Case Study of a Land Well in the Niger Delta

Across the drilling industry, stuck pipe incidents are major contributors of Non-Productive Time during well operations, as significant resources are often dedicated to recovery from stuck pipe and re-work of the well to achieve the objectives. Globally, the drilling industry has committed significant resources towards stuck pipe incident prevention and mitigation. However, with increasingly complex well trajectories being drilled to access deeper reservoirs from existing surface locations, stuck pipe incidents continue. This situation is compounded by subsurface uncertainties like unstable shale intervals. A limited understanding of the characteristics of the in-situ stresses, especially for the unstable shale intervals, may lead to a significant challenge during well execution. For instance, the outcome of the mud weight prediction, from wellbore stability studies and/or during well planning, with inaccurate outcomes could result in challenges during well execution. The paper presents the outcome of the design and execution of a deviated gas well to ensure well bore stability while drilling across shale intervals in a brown field in the Niger Delta Basin, highlighting the impact of stuck pipe incidence on drilling performance. It documents the best practices that were adopted, and the key learning outcomes from a stuck pipe investigation. The paper shares the detailed well design, highlighting the identified hazards that had potential of leading to stuck pipe incidents, the standard solutions implemented during the well program phase, and the impact that the use of real time operations monitoring and algorithms in identifying the onset of a stuck pipe incident. The recovery efforts following stuck pipe incidents and the results of the investigation into the incidents will be presented here. The paper also documents the successful delivery of a well as a dual-zone smart producer. The value of this work is that it provides a robust framework for managing stuck pipe incidents, from prevention to recovery, especially in the face of subsurface uncertainties that can impact wellbore stability studies during the detailed well design. These key learnings are considered best-practices and recommended for use in preventing potential stuck pipe incidents in drilling operations across the Niger Delta basin.