In the past decade gravel-packed, openhole horizontal or high-angle laterals have been employed to enhance reserve recovery in many projects requiring sand control around the world. As the industry finds new ways to improve economics and reserves cost per barrel, more projects have employed intelligent well completions to tap and manage production from multiple reservoirs within a single wellbore.

A sand control technique has been developed and successfully employed in conjunction with intelligent well technology in North Sea wells. In these wells up to four reservoir layers have been completed using a single lateral, openhole gravel pack process. Optimization of reserves recovery required active control of the individual pays in the gravel-packed interval. To enable separate control of the individual pays in these completions, intelligent well components and packers were run inside the screen assembly, and swellable packers were installed with the screen assembly. The tubular and equipment design balanced considerations of both well costs and production rate capability. These wells were engineered to allow the use of standard casing designs incorporating 9 5/8” production casing to benefit well construction costs. The intelligent well completion configuration included 4” flow tubulars with 3.5” inflow control valves to enable target well production rates. The design, functionality and well performance of these wells will be discussed in this presentation.