Japan-based steelmaker JFE Steel has announced that, together with Japan's Marubeni-Itochu Steel Inc., it has supplied the US-based natural resource developer Freeport-McMoRan Oil & Gas LLC with 1,900 mt of heavy-walled casing produced at JFE Steel's Chita works.
The highly corrosion-resistant seamless pipes, which have a maximum thickness of 34.29 mm and outer diameters of 7 to 9 inches, are being used as tieback casings in two wells of an ultra-deep gas field development project in the Gulf of Mexico Deep Shelf.
According to JFE Steel's statement, the project is producing natural gas by using commercial wells at depths of up to 8,900 meters. Previously, it had been considered particularly difficult to drill far beyond conventional depths of around 5,000 meters due to excessively harsh conditions. In this case, the pipes had to be made much stronger and thicker than conventional pipes to resist the greatly increased inner pressures and loads, and had to be resistant to both corrosion and temperatures in excess of 230 degrees Celsius.
To meet such requirements, JFE Steel developed the necessary technologies to manufacture heavy-walled steel pipes that greatly exceed the 13 mm thickness of conventional casing pipe.