PRIORITY

The present application is a U.S. National Stage patent application of International Patent Application No. PCT/US2017/052165, filed on Sep. 19, 2017, the benefit of which is claimed and the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.

TECHNICAL FIELD

The present disclosure relates generally to completing wellbores in the oil and gas industry and, more particularly, to a multilateral junction that permits electrical power and communications signals to be established in both a lateral wellbore and a main wellbore utilizing a unitary multilateral junction.

BACKGROUND

In the production of hydrocarbons, it is common to drill one or more secondary wellbores (alternately referred to as lateral or branch wellbores) from a primary wellbore (alternately referred to as parent or main wellbores). The primary and secondary wellbores, collectively referred to as a multilateral wellbore, may be drilled, and one or more of the primary and secondary wellbores may be cased and perforated using a drilling rig. Thereafter, once a multilateral wellbore is drilled and completed, production equipment such as production casing, packers and screens can be installed in the wellbore, then the drilling rig may be removed and the primary and secondary wellbores are allowed to produce hydrocarbons.

It is often desirable during the installation of the production equipment to include various operational devices such as permanent sensors, flow control valves, digital infrastructure, optical fiber solutions, Intelligent Inflow Control Devices (ICD's), seismic sensors, vibration inducers and sensors and the like that can be monitored and controlled remotely during the life of the producing reservoir. Such equipment is often referred to as intelligent well completion equipment and permits production to be optimized by collecting, transmitting, and analyzing completion, production, and reservoir data; allowing remote selective zonal control and ultimately maximizing reservoir efficiency. Typically, communication signals and electrical power between the surface and the intelligent well completion equipment are via cables extending from the surface. These cables may extend along the interior of a tubing string or the exterior of a tubing string or may be integrally formed within the tubing string walls. However, it will be appreciated that to maintain the integrity of the well, it is desirable for a cable not to breach or cross over pressure barriers formed by the various tubing, casing and components (such as packers, collars, hangers, subs and the like) within the well. For example, it is generally undesirable for a cable to pass between an interior and exterior of a tubing string since the aperture or passage through which the cable would pass could represent a breach of the pressure barrier formed between the interior and exterior of the tubing.

Moreover, because of the construction of the well, it may be difficult to deploy control cables from the surface to certain locations within the well. The presence of junctions between various tubing, casings, and components such as packers, collars, hangers, subs and the like, within the wellbore, particularly when separately installed, may limit the ability to extend cables to certain portions of the wellbore. This is particularly true in the case of lateral wellbores since completion equipment in lateral wellbores is installed separately from installation of completion equipment in the main wellbore. In this regard, it becomes difficult to extend cabling through a junction at the intersection of two wellbores, such as the main and lateral wellbores, because of the installation of equipment into more than one wellbore requires separate trips since the equipment cannot be installed at the same time unless the equipment is small enough to fit side-by-side in the main bore while tripping in the hole. Secondly, if there is more than one wellbore, the equipment would have to be spaced out precisely so that each segment of lateral equipment would be able to exit into its own lateral wellbore at the precise time the other equipment was exiting into their respective laterals, while at the same time maintaining connectivity with other locations in the wellbore.

Therefore, it will be readily appreciated that improvements in the arts of controlling intelligent well completion equipment in a multilateral wellbore are continually needed.

