(Piston Well Services)

By Sheldon Spackman

International Job

Red Deer company called upon to handle blown out gas well in India

Oct 28, 2020 | 1:53 PM

The blowout of a major gas well in India this spring led to a call for help from a Red Deer-based company for its equipment and expertise.

Piston Well Services – described as a leader in snubbing and hydraulic workover services – has been hired to first kill, then abandon the formerly producing well of Baghjan 5 under Oil India Limited (OIL) in Tinsukia district, which blew out on May 27.

According to OIL officials, the blowout occurred while workover operations were underway to produce gas from a new oil and gas-bearing reservoir. Approximately 1,610 nearby families were evacuated, however, three fatalities were said to be associated with the blowout. According to reports, two were initial response firefighters, while the third was an electrician helping with welding activities during the capping.

Ross Whelan, General Manager of Piston Well Services, says the well blew out of control for a couple of weeks before finally igniting and exploding.

“It’s in a remote wetland,” he explained. “Alert Disaster Control (from Singapore) responded to the well site and was able to cap it after several attempts while it was burning. The flow is temporarily diverted right now, so now they’re just waiting for the arrival of our snubbing unit to get on top of that well and push a string of pipe into it so we can pump some fluid into it and kill the well.”

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Whelan says they’ve sent four highly-skilled Red Deer crew members to the site in northeast India, where they arrived about one week ago – still waiting for their equipment to show up.

“The equipment is taking several routes. The snubbing unit because of the height restrictions has to take a longer route, so it will be 10-12 days before it’s all ready at the site and ready to assemble.”

Whelan noted there’s plenty of prep work for the small Red Deer crew to do in the meantime.

“They’re building a sub-structure and preparing for the anchor points for the guy lines and moving flow lines around. So there’s lots to do.”

After a couple months of planning and very long days, Whelan says over 400 items were eventually loaded onto the world’s largest civilian transport aircraft – the ANTONOV (AN124) in Calgary last week to send the necessary gear on its way.

“Through the COVID travel restrictions these days, it created its own challenges,” he admitted. “Arriving in India to load and find adequate equipment that would haul all that heavy stuff down the road for quite a long ways – that was another logistical challenge. Coming out of Canada in the month of October and into India where its 38 degrees, that’s another challenge.”

Whelan also noted the wellhead they’re rigging-up on is damaged, posing further difficulties for the crew, who will receive help from several other companies involved.

“So there’s a lot of contingencies and safeguards that we have to be considering and preparing for,” he remarks. “It’s not your usual blowout. It blew for so long now and been on fire for so long that critical parts have melted and have eroded and a lot of the cement plugs that you’d normally rely on at the surface are eroded, so there’s a lot of integrity issues that we have to balance and control.”

If all goes according to plan, Whelan anticipates a few days or so for crews to be able to kill the well.

“The plug and abandonment is estimated to take another three weeks,” adds Whelan. “At the moment, the plan then is to rig the equipment out, put it on a ship, and it will float back to Canada.”

Whelan describes the job as a massive one for his company.

“We’ve been in the U.S. before, of course worked all over the western Canadian basin, but this is our first international job,. For it to be such a high profile job, it’s a huge feather in our cap, absolutely. It really says that there’s a lot of Canadian talent that’s in the pool.”