Plug design

.RWF 8.3. Plug placement

Cement plugs are usually placed using the balanced plug method where the
cement is placed in the annulus and the pipe in a way to leave a continuous
.cemented section in the well when the pipe is pulled out of the hole
Chapter 12, Plug and Abandonment, provides detail on well abandonment
design, this section demonstrates the usefulness of simulation for a cement
.plug job
If the cementing string is a simple pipe, the balanced plug calculations are
straight forward. However, when a tailpipe is used (to decrease the risk of
swabbing), the interfaces in the annulus and in the drill-pipe may not move
together, and the related calculations become too complex to be done manually. The volumes
.can be optimized using a simulator to build the placement design
Prejob well circulation should be simulated similar to a casing job. This
prejob circulation can be used to simulate temperature and rheology conditioning before the
.cement job
Once the volumes are optimized, the hydraulic and temperature simulations can be run similar
to a casing cement job to check that well control is
maintained, and to obtain simulated temperature and pressure schedules for
laboratory testing which will predict when compressive strength will
.develop in the plug cement
Recommended workflow—Plug—Volume optimization 7.13.3.1
Optimizing the volume of the cement, spacer and displacement volume can
significantly improve cement plug placement results. Several papers have
been written about how simulators can be used to improve cement plug
results. Bogaerts et al. (2012) discusses setting plugs in Deepwater in SPE
and Yabin Guo et al. (2014) discusses the use of a cement plug simulator for HPHT 155736
.wells in SPE 171395
Several options are available for optimizing the volumes of cement spacer
and displacement volumes. The most intuitive option is to calculate the volumes so that all of
the interfaces are at the same depth inside and outside the
pipe, however, this may lead to significant contamination at the fluid interfaces. Better results
will be achieved by optimizing spacer and slurry volumes. Four optimizations and their
characterizations are described as
:follows
Level slurry and spacer—Construct a placement according to the traditional balanced plug -
calculation, with slurry and spacer interfaces level