Stuck Pipe Best Practices – A Challenging Approach to Reducing Stuck Pipe Costs

Abstract

Abstract Stuck pipe incidents are one of the major operational challenges of the E&P industry and events usually lead to significant amount of lost time and associated costs. Various industry estimates claim that stuck pipe costs may exceed several hundred million US dollars per year. In Saudi Aramco, the recent increase in drilling activity, drilling in depleted and higher-risk reservoirs have led to an increased risk of stuck pipe. In 2010 Saudi Aramco formed a task force to focus on lowering its stuck pipe costs. In its campaign to reduce this cost, the task force selected key personnel from each of the Drilling & Workover (D&WO) operating departments. This paper summarizes the result of the Stuck Pipe Teams’ findings and the best practice documents generated. For 2009, 69.5% of the total stuck pipes were due to mechanical sticking and 30.5% attributed to differential sticking. Furthermore, based on the team's findings, a customized training plan was formulated to certify key D&WO operations personnel every 2 years.