Periodic integrity testing of well barriers—such as the production master valve and the subsurface safety valve—is essential to ensuring safe production operations and is also often a regulatory requirement. The usual approach is to record pressure build-up or decay in a test cavity and calculate a valve leakage rate. Analysis of the data may however be difficult, especially under conditions of cooldown, in deep wells, in the absence of downhole instruments, or in the case of multiphase fluid. This study presents a model-based method that can work under such conditions and assesses it using data from the field.

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