The paper describes the approach, developed by two oil and gas companies, in the formulation of rules for the material selection for OCTGs, used in a software developed to support corrosion engineers on
their job. Zones are defined, based on pH and pH2S values, according in principle to the European Federation for Corrosion approach to sour environment definition. For each zone a set of rules, depending principally on the chloride content and temperature, is applied not only to decide if the material is applicable or not but also to assign to each material, in a given environment, a performance index (PI). The performance index is a parameter indicating the judgment upon the resistance of the material in given conditions even in the cases where there is not a fully reliable applicability of the material. In this case the performance index gives a qualitative evaluation on the probability of the
material to resist in the given conditions and helps the corrosion engineer to decide on the opportunity to make testing on that material and which type of testing. In a first phase the PI is evaluated for each form of corrosion attack: uniform corrosion, localized corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, etc., and in a second phase these partial PIs are combined to form a overall PI for each material. The software also uses the PI as an input to the risk evaluation module that makes the evaluation based upon the PI and the possible consequences of a failure. Another application of the PI in the software is to perform the economical comparison between different alternative materials for the well completion.