OREANDA-NEWS. JFE Steel Corporation announced that together with Marubeni-Itochu Steel Inc. it has supplied natural resource developer Freeport-McMoRan Oil & Gas LLC 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, which have a maximum thickness of 34.29mm (1.350 in) 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. The 1,900-ton order is the largest so far for JFE-UHP-15CR-125.

The project is producing natural gas by using commercial wells at depths of up to 8,900 meters (29,200feet). 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 greatly increased inner pressures and loads, and resistant to both corrosion and temperatures in excess of 230 degrees Celsius (446 degrees Fahrenheit).

To meet such requirements, JFE Steel developed the necessary technologies to manufacture heavy-walled steel pipe that greatly exceed the 13mm (0.5 in) thickness of conventional casing pipe. For the casing connections, JFE's newly developed JFELION(tm)-HW premium connection for heavy-walled casing strings was tested and adopted.

Now that it has been confirmed that natural gas deposits can exist under conventionally developed gas pools, the success of this project is expected to lead to increased use of ultra-deep wells.

Freeport-McMoRan Oil & Gas operates in the USA and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold (FCX). FCX is a premier U.S.-based natural resource company with an industry leading global portfolio of mineral assets, significant oil and gas resources and an industry leading position in the emerging ultra-deep gas trend with sizeable potential, located offshore in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico and onshore in South Louisiana.