Advances in Well Completion And Stimulation During JPT's First Quarter Century

Abstract

The sharing of research advances and field developments in JPT has provided a synergism that has had an important bearing on the great provided a synergism that has had an important bearing on the great technical achievements of the petroleum industry. Each sharing has triggered a chain reaction of new ideas and new work that has resulted in an explosion of technology. Introduction It is with pleasure, but some trepidation, that I review industry progress in well completion and well stimulation for this Silver Anniversary celebration of the Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT). I am pleased because I would like to emphasize the valuable role that JPT has played in engineering communication. In my opinion, the sharing of research advances and field developments in JPT bas provided a synergism that has had an important provided a synergism that has had an important bearing on the great technical achievements of the petroleum industry. Each sharing bas triggered a petroleum industry. Each sharing bas triggered a chain reaction of new ideas and new work that has resulted in an explosion of technology. On the other hand, I have some misgivings about my task, because the areas of well completion and stimulation are so broad in scope and the important technical advances so numerous that it is impossible to give proper recognition to all in a review article. There are many hundreds of papers about these operations, and anyone attempting to summarize advances in them certainly assumes the strong risk of offending many important contributors by omission. Undoubtedly, a different author with a different background might emphasize different papers; however, I have attempted to minimize the risk by drawing liberally on the opinions of others to help me in my task. Because of space limitations, in some instances a choice of references had to be made between the original, idealized work on a given subject and later work that extended the analysis to include conditions closer to actual well conditions. When the original work was the basic study that opened a new area for study, it was used as the primary reference. Since this issue of JPT commemorates a quarter century of service, my objective will be to give a broad overview of each main topic, with emphasis on the role that JPT played in communicating new technology. The discussion will not attempt to refer to all the technology in well completion and stimulation, but only to highlight a few of the important developments and concepts. The importance of JPT's role will become obvious from the number of references cited in JPT relative to major technical advances. However, in some areas, for example formation damage by drilling fluids and sand control - some of the early basic work was published in other journals and will be used. Nevertheless, as one searches the literature, it soon becomes obvious that the stature of JPT rapidly grew after its inception in 1949, and by the middle 1950's virtually all of the major technical advances were appearing in JPT. Under the broad heading of Well Completion we shall discuss completion mechanics, completion fluids, cementing, perforating, and sand control. JPT P. 1447