Passing wellhead valves restored with no intervention downtime: ADCO Bab Field, Abu Dhabi

The valve and its duty

ADCO Bab Field runs wellhead valves on producing gas and oil wells in Abu Dhabi.

A wellhead valve must move freely on demand and isolate cleanly when closed.

ADCO found hard-to-operate and passing valves in several wells across the field.

Passing at the wellhead weakens isolation at the point where control matters most.

Hard operation also slows routine work and invites forced movement that damages internals.

What had been tried before

The wells already received a valve lubricant as part of routine care.

The current lubricant did not prevent these valve problems.

Passing and hard operation continued, so ADCO agreed a controlled field trial instead.

A trial defines success in advance and measures it on named wells.

That gave ADCO a clean comparison against its existing lubrication routine.

The intervention

1. The field trial injected BTR VSI valve lubricant into gas wells Bb-195, 373 and 466.
2. Each well stayed in production, with no intervention downtime for the trial.
3. Operators then checked valve operation and isolation for two months.
4. The trial was later repeated in two oil production wells.

A fixed monitoring window turns a single injection into usable condition evidence.

Repeated checks under normal well operation show whether the improvement actually holds.

The result

The valves stopped passing and worked more smoothly during the two-month monitoring period.

The oil well valves also stopped passing after the repeat trial.

No well was taken out of service to get these results.

Results like these remain screening evidence for each individual asset.

A separate seat test is still the proof of isolation performance on any valve.

See the field results from more live valve work across other settings.

Explore valve products for the lubricant and sealant range used in the field.

Our guide to hard-to-operate valves explains this failure pattern in more depth.