Optimized well clean-up planning and procedures are crucial for the effective development of offshore subsea wells and their subsequent production stage to host facilities. The objective of the well cleanup is aimed at ensuring a successful removal of the completion fluids and drill-in fluid out of the wellbore to restore connectivity with the reservoir, maximize well productivity while minimizing tensile sand failure, and properly conditioning the sand face completion (in a standalone screen scenario). To achieve this goal, the well clean-up time, bean-up procedure, rate and fluid volumes to be produced should be appropriately estimated to properly size the surface testing equipment required for the operation.

Due to the highly dynamic and transient nature of the cleanup process, the use of a dynamic simulator was required to effectively capture the physics of the concurrent flow of the various phases present in the system. An extensive modelling and simulation of the unload process has been performed through the use of a dynamic multiphase simulator to assess the transient displacement of the various wellbore fluids according to several unload strategies. Potential clean-up times and volumes were assessed using flowrate ramp-up schedules designed for different completion fluid distributions in the wellbore. The constrained flowrate cases were considered to represent the constraint on the rig (restricted because of surface handling capacity issues).

The well clean-up procedure was developed to minimize clean-up time, avoid formation damage, and minimize volume of formation liquids on flow back during the rig well tests. During the execution, the movement of fluids along the wellbore, surface production rates, the drawdowns and duration of clean-up to predefined targets were monitored and recorded. The acquired field data from the clean-up operation was compared against simulation prediction and validated the reliability of the predictive model.

This study proves the transient multiphase simulation to be effective in capturing the physics of the multiphase flow process involved in the clean-up operation. It also demonstrates that, when appropriately done, it could be an effective tool for the planning and strategy selection for the well cleanup operation.