Development Directions for Performance Evaluation Methods of Chemical plugging Material Used in Hydrocarbon Reservoirs

Currently, lab evaluation methods for plugging materials used in oil and gas reservoirs predominantly focus on assessing their pressure-bearing and reservoir protection capabilities, which serve as the basis for well intervention. However, with technical progress and social development, meeting only a few operational requirements is insufficient for field trials or practical application. This necessitates re-testing and re-evaluation on site, often requiring multiple attempts before well intervention, leading to prolonged duration before field application and low success rates. A review of nearly 1,000 domestic and international publications on oil and gas well safety, reservoir protection as well as environmental conservation reveals the necessity to test five performance metrics for field application: effective sealing, stability under pressure, maintainable flow, regulatory compliance, and affordability. These metrics form the basis for categorizing testing methods into five distinct classes. Incorporating big data analytics to study the relationship between application success rate and the number of test metrics, as well as the correlation between application time and test metrics, it was discovered that materials evaluated across all five metrics have up to a 62% higher success rate compared to those assessed on a single metric. Completing all five evaluation method categories increases lab time but can save up to 77% of time before field application. The results indicate that evaluating these five metrics before applying plugging materials addresses the challenges of prolonged duration before application and low efficiency. This not only provides evaluation criteria and testing methods for the field application of reservoir plugging materials but also offers a reference methodology for other wellbore operation materials.