JFE Steel Corporation, together with Marubeni-Itochu Steel, has supplied natural resource developer Freeport-McMoRan Oil & Gas with 1,900 tons of JFE-UHP-15CR-125 heavy-walled casing produced at JFE Steel’s Chita works. The highly corrosion-resistant seamless pipes have a maximum thickness of 1.350” and outer diameters of 7” to 9”. They are being used as tieback casings in two wells of an ultra-deep gas field development project in the Gulf of Mexico Deep Shelf. The 1,900-ton order is the largest so far for JFE-UHP-15CR-125.
The project produces natural gas by using commercial wells at depths of up to 8,900m. Previously, it had been considered particularly difficult to drill far beyond conventional depths of around 5,000m due to excessively harsh conditions. In this case, the pipes had to be made much stronger and thicker than conventional pipes to resist the increased inner pressures and loads, as well as corrosion and temperatures in excess of 230°C.
To meet such requirements, JFE Steel manufactured heavy-walled steel pipe that greatly exceed the 13mm (0.5”) thickness of conventional casing pipe and adopted JFE’s newly developed JFELION™-HW premium connection for heavy-walled casing strings for the casing connections.
