There are hundreds of thousands of inactive oil & gas wells in the USA, millions in the world that all need to be plugged and abandoned. In that process, environmental regulators require operators to certify that no well will emit methane gas or other harmful fluids. Key emission-risk factors include the Darcy permeability of rock-formation layers, the contact quality of the steel well casing with the formation, and the presence of cracks in the formation. It is prohibitively expensive to inspect the formation directly by perforating the casing, injecting fluids etc. Measurement tools in the well can transmit acoustic, electromagnetic, and other energy forms into the formation and receive signals back, but with strong attenuation by the casing. This project uses mathematical analysis, numerical simulation, lab experiments, and well-log data to study how to infer permeability and other risk factors (and quantify their uncertainty) from well logs.
Sponsored by: Equinor
ERL Personnel: Aimé Fournier (PI), Laurent Demanet, Herbert Einstein, Xin Cui, Yuesu Jin, Sihong Wu, Ignacio Arzuaga Garcia, Youjin Jeong
Collaborators: Alex Merciu (Equinor)