Inspection/Recovery Strategy

The key to maximizing recovery value is to employ a fluid and dynamic strategy to analyze evolving requirements and product availability.

As you may or may not know, there is substantial value in production tubing that is pulled out of producing wells.  This tubing can potentially be inspected, repaired, re-utliziled or sold as salvage. Inspected tubing is classified into different colour bands depending on the remaining wall thickness of the pipe. If the wear on the wall of the pipe is too substantial for re-use, the material can be sold off to a market outside of the Energy sector for a variety of uses from piling for a dock to cattle guards.

Under Alpine’s direction, a key client adjusted its abandonment strategy to avoid unnecessary repairs to inspected, but in need of repair, tubing. Surplus disposition partners were just as eager to utilize unrepaired inspected tubing and there was no value to performing the additional work. Alpine halted the repairs and continued to see top dollar for the material, while limiting the cost to the client. This resulted in a savings of $25-50 per joint on material sold to market. Additionally, Alpine identified Green Band tubing having 31-50% wall thickness remaining, was not being properly colour banded as such.  This occurred primarily because the client was not running it back in their programs, and as a result this tubing was being classified and lumped with red band tubing. This simple change increased recovery value of all green band tubing up to 220% with zero additional cost.  Alpine also stopped the repair of connections on pipe that would be sold for cattle guards. This resulted in a savings of $3000-5000 per month in repair costs.