In-Situ Tests
Cavern Testing
Understanding the behavior of salt caverns requires specialized skills but as well as accurate data. Brouard Consulting provides many testing services. A non-comprehensive list of tests that can be performed includes:
- Cavern compressibility tests
- Well tightness tests
- Borehole permeability tests
- Abandonment tests
- Pressure/Temperature logs
- Long-term wellhead & downhole temperature measurements
WTLog
Obtaining formation characteristics in a tight-gas environment is highly challenging: formation-testing tools run during open-hole logging are often unsuccessful, and conventional well tests are not appropriate, as no gas flow usually is observed before hydraulic fracturing. Brouard Consulting and LMS (Ecole Polytechnique, France) have developed, for TOTAL, a new well-testing methodology adapted from techniques used in the salt industry and successfully applied to Tight Gas Reservoirs, using only wellhead pressure gauges and surface flow meters without downhole tools. It delivers an injectivity index profile along the open hole, allowing better identification of the zones with the best potential and optimization of the hydraulic fracturing strategy.
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Testing Equipment
Brouard Consulting uses several types of very accurate pressure gauges, including several types of Paroscientic gauges. Paroscientic digiquartz gauges provide extremely high accuracy, resolution, and stability.
In some circumstances very accurate measurement of temperature is required. This is the case for instance when dealing with the long-term abandonment of salt cavern or for creep test under very small deviatoric stresses. For that purpose Brouard Consulting uses Pt1000 platinum temperature gauges associated with dedicated electronic. This type of sensor is used for temperature logs and long-term measurement of cavern temperature in salt caverns. The resolution has been proved to be in the order of 0.02°C during a test at Gellenoncourt (France).
Accurate flowmeters are often required when testing salt caverns. Flowmeters are widely used in the petroleum industry but the data provided are not always very reliable and accurate.
Brouard Consulting holds several Krohne massic flowmeters. This flowmeters allows to accurately measure liquid flows, but also liquid density and temperature. The accuracy is in the order of 0.1 to 0.2% of the measured value.
Brouard Consulting holds two high-pressure triplex plunger pumps from Cat Pumps.
