Case Histories Illustrate escalating use of Monobore Expandable Liner Extensions incorporated into well designs to facilitate Drilling and Completing Trouble zones while eliminating NPT

The Baker Hughes linEXX™ monobore expandable liner extension system places a liner string in the wellbore below an existing casing string and expands it, resulting in a liner with the same inside diameter (ID) as the previous casing string. When planned in your casing design, this system will isolate trouble drilling zones such as sloughing, unstable formations, and thief zones while maximizing hole size and without reducing the casing ID. The system can be applied in wells with anticipated trouble drilling zones such as depleted reservoirs or wells with narrow margins between pore pressure and fracture pressure, thereby eliminating the associated costs of managed drilling, chemical treatments and nonproductive time (NPT). Critical drilling problems of collapsed hole, lost circulation, substantial NPT, and costs associated with chemical treatments are effectively resolved or negated by using the monobore expandable extension system. Unlike other solid expandable systems on the market, the linEXX system provides an additional barrier without a loss of hole size, allowing the use of conventional bit and tubular sizes. Its top-down approach lets you place an expandable liner string in the wellbore while letting you maintain the same casing drift of the previous or existing intermediate casing string. The system is available in 9-⅝ in. or 9-⅞ in. sizes. When used as part of the base casing design, the linEXX liner not only optimizes hole size to the reservoir, but also eliminates costly NPT typically involved with the openhole section that would have required a conventional step-down liner.