Stranger Things 3: Not All Temperature Simulators are Created Equal

The risk of improper temperature selection for the design and testing of cement slurries can be detrimental to well construction operations and could affect a well's integrity. The methods for temperature selection in API 10B-2 do not consistently reflect the representative bottomhole conditions for high temperature applications. More so, consider 10B-2 guidance valuable for proving benchmarks in the high temperature domain. Therefore, numerical temperature simulators help manage the risk by predicting the anticipated bottomhole cementing temperatures. Currently several temperature simulators are in use to predict, with better accuracy, cementing bottomhole temperatures. The manuscript investigates the strange differences in predictions between the simulators for a range of high temperature applications. The results of the work efforts should help end users understand the outputs allowing better judgement when selecting representative bottomhole cementing temperatures for a given application.