The same rig and crew skills that service a well through its producing life also stand at both ends of it. On the front end, the completion: taking a freshly cased hole from the drilling rig and building the machine that produces it, tubing, packer, pump, wellhead. On the back end, plug and abandonment: closing a finished well so it protects groundwater and neighbors forever, to the letter of state requirements, with the location left the way the surface owner and the regulator both expect. Neither job is glamorous. Both are permanent, which is exactly why they reward crews who do them to standard.
The completion: building the producing machine
The drilling rig leaves behind cased, cemented hole; the completion turns it into a well. Perforating opens the pay (on a new well this often comes with the completion crew's work, coordinated with the wireline company), and then the production string goes in: tubing tallied joint by joint, threads doped and made up to spec, tested as it runs. At design depth sits the packer, sealing tubing to casing so production has one path, or on a rod-pumped well a tubing anchor that holds the string in tension against the pump's cyclic load. Landing nipples and profiles ride the string where the design wants future plugs and gauges to seat, small hardware that later workovers will thank the original crew for.
Before the packer sets, the annulus is displaced to packer fluid, an inhibited brine, clean and at a chosen density, the quiet detail that decides how the casing looks in twenty years. Brines belong to the same family covered on the drilling fluids page: solids-free, density from dissolved salt, and picked here for corrosion protection and a known hydrostatic backup should the tubing ever leak. Then the wellhead nipples up, the tree or pumping unit goes on, everything pressure tests, and the well gets its send-off: swabbed in, jetted with nitrogen, or simply put on pump. First oil in the tank is the completion crew's signature.
P&A: closing the well right
Every well ends, and the end is a regulated, engineered operation, not a walk-away. The recovery comes first: tubing, packer, and rods out of the hole, salvage graded on the rack, and any obstruction dealt with, including the occasional fish that gets one last economic look before being cemented in place with the state's blessing. Then the barriers go in, from the bottom up: cement plugs across every productive and injection zone, plugs at casing shoes and stubs where the rules require, a dedicated plug protecting usable-quality groundwater, and a surface plug near the top. Placement is proven, not presumed: plugs are tagged with the workstring, and tested where the rule or the program says, because a plug at the wrong depth is a barrier in name only. In Texas the framework is the Railroad Commission's, notice before the work, plugs per the rules, and the plugging report filed after, and every producing state runs its own version of the same logic: permanent isolation of everything the well ever connected.
The last day belongs to the cutting torch and the dozer: casing cut off below plow depth, a steel cap welded over the stub, the wellhead and surface equipment hauled off, pits closed, and the location graded and restored. Done right, in a season the pasture doesn't remember there was a well. Done loose, the well comes back, as pressure on a cap, as gas in somebody's water well, as a line item with interest, which is why the industry's growing P&A and orphan-well workload is rig work with a long future, and why operators who plug to standard sleep better than operators who plugged cheap.
The same craft, both directions
A completion and a P&A are the same skills pointed opposite ways: pipe handled and tallied honestly, cement placed where the program says and proven there, pressure tests believed over optimism, records kept like they'll be read in thirty years, because they will. That's the through-line of this whole series, from routine servicing to the last plug: the wells that run well and end well belong to operators and crews who treat the boring disciplines as the job itself.
Common questions
How long do these jobs take?
A straightforward single-string completion runs a few days; a simple P&A likewise, two to four rig days plus cement and cleanup. Depth, plug count, obstructions, and surprises in the well file stretch both, and on P&A the file is often decades old, so the bid deserves contingency.
Can a plugged well ever be reopened?
Rarely and expensively: plugs can be drilled out and wells re-entered, but P&A is designed and regulated as permanent. If there's a credible future use, uphole zones, injection, the time to decide is before the cement, with a temporary abandonment done to the state's TA rules instead.
Who pays for plugging orphan wells?
When an operator fails, state plugging funds and, in recent years, federal orphan-well programs pick up wells with no responsible party, worked through the same state commissions and plugged to the same standards by contract rigs. It's a meaningful and growing share of workover-rig demand.
The series, and where Vexon fits
Previous: fishing. This closes the workover operations series; the pillar guide is workover rig services, and the wider library lives on the knowledge hub. Vexon provides completion, plugging, and workover rig services to qualified operators: get in touch and ask for our qualification form.