Chemical Treatments Mitigate Costly Problems When Restarting Shut-In Wells By Rick McCurdy OKLAHOMA CITY-The oil and gas industry has learned many lessons over the years, but one of the most frustrating and painful is a recurring lesson: The prices for the industry's commodity products are always in a process of changing, and they can fluctuate wildly over time. The current pricing environment continues to improve, but it is important to remember that there have been many times in the past when market prices for both oil and natural gas have fallen to levels where it cost more to bring the products out of the ground and prepare them for sale than the actual value gained by selling them. The second quarter of 2020 was unlike anything the industry had experienced. The scale of well shut-ins in early spring and the circumstances behind it may have been unprecedented, but the practice of shutting in wells during periods of sub-breakeven prices was not. In the conventional oil and gas production space, operators long ago adapted to uneconomical price scenarios by simply shutting in oil or gas wells and waiting for prices to improve. In trying to restart extended shut-ins in the past, operators have learned another costly lesson: Conventional wells that were shut in without proper chemical conditioning routinely suffered damage, primarily from both acid gas corrosion and microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC). In the unconventional world, operators now are learning that same lesson still applies as they start bringing horizontal and conventional vertical wells back on line. 40 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER