This principally involves preparing the bottom of the hole to the required specifications, running in the production tubing and its associated down ho

This principally involves preparing the bottom of the hole to the required specifications, running in the production tubing and its associated down hole tools as well as perforating and stimulating as required. Sometimes in petroleum production, completion is the process of making a well ready for production (or injection)., the process of running in and cementing the casing is also included.
This designation refers to a range of completions where the tubulars[clarification needed (definition)] across the production zone are not cemented in place. Openhole completions have seen significant uptake in recent years, and there are many configurations, often developed to address specific reservoir challenges. There have been many recent developments which has boosted the success of openhole completions, and they also tend to be popular in horizontal wells, where cemented liners are more expensive and technically more difficult. The common options for openhole completions are;
1) pre-holed liner (also often called pre-drilled liner). The liner is prepared with multiple small drilled holes, then set across the production zone to provide wellbore stability and an intervention conduit. Pre-holed liner is often combined with openhole packers, such as swelling elastomers, mechanical packers or external casing packers, to provide zonal segregation and isolation. It is now quite common to see a combination of pre-holed liner, solid liner and swelling elastomer packers to provide an initial isolation of unwanted water or gas zones. Multiple sliding sleeves can also be used in conjunction with openhole packers to provide considerable flexibility in zonal flow control for the life of the wellbore.
This type of completion is also being adopted in some water injection wells, although these require a much greater performance envelope for openhole packers, due to the considerable pressure and temperature changes that occur in water injectors.
Openhole completions (in comparison with cemented liners) require better understanding of formation damage, wellbore clean-up and fluid loss control. A key difference is that perforating penetrates through the first 6-18inches (15-45cm) of formation around the wellbore, whilst openhole completions require the reservoir fluids to flow through all of the filtrate-invaded zone around the wellbore and lift-off of the mud filter cake.
Many openhole completions will incorporate fluid loss valves at the top of the liner to provide well control whilst the upper completion is run.
There are an increasing number of ideas coming into the market place to extend the options for openhole completions; for example, electronics can be used to provide a self-opening or self-closing liner valve. This might be used in an openhole completion to improve clean-up, by bringing the well onto production from the toe-end for 100 days, then self-opening the heel-end. Inflow control devices and intelligent completions are also installed as openhole completions.
Pre-holed liner may provide some basic control of solids production, where the wellbore is thought to fail in aggregated chunks of rubble, but it is not typically regarded as a sand control completion.
2) Slotted liner can be selected as an alternate to pre-holed liner, sometimes as a personal preference or from established practice on a field. It can also be selected to provide a low cost control of sand/solids production. The slotted liner is machined with multiple longitudinal slots, for example 2 mm x 50mm, spread across the length and circumference of each joint. Recent advances in laser cutting means that slotting can now be done much cheaper to much smaller slot widths and in some situation slotted liner is now used for the same functionality as sand control screens.
3) Openhole sand control is selected where the liner is required to mechanically hold-back the movement of formation sand. There are many variants of openhole sand control, the three popular choices being stand-alone screens, openhole gravel packs (also known as external gravel packs, where a sized sand 'gravel' is placed as an annulus around the sand control screen) and expandable screens. Screen designs are mainly wire-wrap or premium; wire-wrap screens use spiral-welded corrosion-resistant wire wrapped around a drilled basepipe to provide a consistent small spiral gap (such as 0.012-inch (0.30 mm), termed 12 gauge). Premium screens use a woven metal cloth wrapped around a basepipe. Expandable screens are run to depth before being mechanically swaged to a larger diameter. Ideally, expandable screens will be swaged until they contact the wellbore wall.