...especially fresh water aquifers. To always stay in control and avoid costly repair jobs, these barrier elements should last and remain intact with full integrity during the construction phase of the well, during the production/injection phase of the well, and forever after the well has been plugged and abandoned.

Most international governmental bodies and authorities, together with the most serious oil companies have very strict rules and regulations for how to install well barriers and its integrity, due to the high risk of handling oil and gas and the extreme safety and environmental consequences and huge damages a loss of control can cause.

There are some terrible examples on how bad it can go if you lose the control, as for example the Macondo, Deep Water Horizon accident and the Piper Alpha disaster.

...allowable operating pressure, production or injection may have to be suspended and require a costly workover.

The symptoms itself can be mitigated by bleeding off the pressure at regular intervals if there is easy access to the wellhead, but this will not cure the problem. In this case, it is common to fill the annulus with a heavier fluid in order to increase the hydrostatic pressure in the well, but this again will not cure the problem long term.

To cure the problem however, the pressure needs to be isolated from the wellhead by a gas tight plugging material close to and across the source. QuartzPack™ may be a viable solution for such wells provided the existing annulus fluid can be displaced, either out into the formation or out of the well.

Annulus shear strength is necessary only for transfer of load from the casing to the formation, ie. structural support/ anchoring of the casing. For pressure control and zonal isolation, the 2.15 sg heavy, gas-tight, self-healing, no loss QP is the most suitable material to prevent oil/gas from leaking to surface or into/across shallow formation zones.

QP does not shrink or harden, so when pressure testing or mechanical activity is ongoing inside the casing, no fractures or micro-annulus will be created, and the effect of thermal expansion... ...is minimized, with less localized stress on the casing string.

With QP behind casing, the casing can easily be cut and retrieved. Utilizing QP will save a lot of expensive rig time, since there is no waiting for a hardening process after each casing section.

QP provides annulus seal properties and with everlasting hydrostatic head. External forces on the casing will not affect the sealing properties in the QP filled annulus as QP will become liquidized and then re-shape according to the new well geometrics.