RIASSUNTO
Abstract
Recently, there has been a drive towards a risk-based approach to plug & abandonment (P&A) design. To apply a risk-based approach for decision-making, i.e. to decide if a P&A design is acceptable or not, risk acceptance criteria have to be established and be approved by authorities. This paper presents the core of a risk-based approach, and then present three alternative risk acceptance criteria based on leakage risk of permanently plugged and abandoned wells.
The core elements of the risk-based approach for evaluation of the containment performance in permanently plugged and abandoned wells consist of estimating probability of leakage and associated leakage rates for any proposed P&A design. These will then have to be used to evaluate the acceptability of the design, by comparing them to some defined acceptance criteria. Different principles can be followed to define such criteria, such as being consistent by accepting risk levels which have been considered acceptable in other situations, environmental survivability or considering the cost-benefit to optimize the allocation of funds.
The approach and principles used are described and applied in the context of P&A design. Based on the specification of an actual gas producing well that was permanently plugged and abandoned on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS), a synthetic case study is established. Simulations are carried out to provide estimations of the core elements of the risk-based approach, i.e. leakage rate and probability of the leakage, for the synthetic case. Three examples of risk acceptance criteria are then presented and discussed. The estimations derived from simulations for the synthetic case study are used to exemplify the strengths and weaknesses of the three acceptance criteria.