Design And Preparation Of Plastic Pipelines For Sand Control In Oilfield

At present, many of the oilfields in China, such as the Shengli Oilfield, theDaqing Oilfield and Zhongyuan Oilfield, have already entered high water outputperiod and the sand production problem is more and more serious. During mining,the wide use of the steam huff and puff technology make the sand productionproblem more serious. Sand production will reduce the oil production and causepipeline plugging. In addition to that, it will lead to serious wear problems to theequipments and cause deformation of drive-pipes. Finally, the oil production isreduced and the costs are higher. Owing to its simple procedure, low costs and goodusing effect, the chemical sand prevention technique has been greatly appreciated.However, the application of chemical sand control technology will be extremelylimited in the absence of suitable supporting pipes.According to the requirements of oil exploitation, the supporting pipes must bedensely perforated in order to facilitate crude oil flow, and the perforated pipesshould have sufficient strength to resist the tensile stress caused by its own gravityand the compressive stress when being pressured into the well, and lastly the pipesmust be easily breakable in order to drill deeper to exploit more hydrocarbonreservoir.In this study, the glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP) pipelines were chosenfrom a great many pipelines of different properties to solve this problem. However,the survey results of scientific literatures showed that the report on the mechanicalproperties of GFRP pipelines is rare, and the research on densely drilled GFRPpipelines has not been reported.In this paper, a kind of plastic pipe suitable in sand control in oilfield wasdeveloped. This kind of pipe, with the advantages of low cost, high strength, easilybreakable, easy processing properties, overcame the shortcomings of the commonlyused expandable sand screen and wire wrapped screen. Through combination ofchemical sand consolidation agents, these pipelines can be widely applied in sandcontrol and sand consolidation during petroleum production. It would be able tosignificantly reduce the costs and improve the efficiency of oil production.In the study, we carefully chose the basic raw materials of GFRP pipelines,designed the structure and measured the mechanical properties, such as tensilestrength, compression strength, bending strength and the anti-wear property and the crushing property. The results showed that the tensile strength of the GFRPpipelines was greater than18MPa, and the compressive strength maintained above20MPa. Three-point bending tests indicated that the maximum bending load ofGFRP pipelines could reach to29.04kN and the deformation ability of the pipelineswas good enough to be used in horizontal wells. Lastly, it was found that thepipelines, either made from191#or196#resin, were easy to be broken by therotating head under relative low speed and pressure.In summary, this kind of densely drilled GFRP pipelines could satisfy thespecified requirements of mechanical and deformation properties. Therefore, thepipelines could replace the traditional expandable sand screens, which is quiteprofitable by reducing the costs of sand control. It is a good technologicalinnovation in sand control in oil fields.