Artificial Lift Performance Blog

For decades we’ve had the boom and bust in our industry, that goes with the ebb and flow of the price of oil. Yikes, we’re in another crisis!

The drilling and production of unconventional wells, the availability of funding, longer laterals and bigger frac jobs has resulted in North American operators chasing production with the drill bit, at $10 million dollars per well. That’s great in a greater than $45/barrel cost environment.

As Warren Buffet says ‘It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked’.

We are currently in such a moment in our industry. How can we learn from this?

Over the last few blogs we’ve talked a lot about the value of automated processing of realtime data in the oilfield. Today I’d like to ‘land the plane’ a little and make that more tangible for wells produced using gaslift…as well as make this a quick read.

Are meetings and emails taking up so much of your time that it’s hard to get down to the basics of production optimization - modeling your wells? In a recent mentoring session with an operator’s engineers, I had the engineers write down what they do on a daily basis. The answer shocked me:

When oil prices are low it’s more important than ever that we optimize the way our wells are produced. How can we “double down” to ensure that our wells are produced efficiently at the lowest cost of operation? This article summarizes how you can do that now and for the long term.

If you have a well designed to produce 1000 barrels per day and it only produces 800 barrels, how do you determine why? More importantly, can you understand how to remedy the issue and gain the additional 200 barrels? And then, can further production gains be achieved?

This blog will discuss the questions that every unconventional operator wants to have answered, “which artificial lift method should I use?” and “when should I change lift method?”

Automation, digitalization, machine learning and analytics are seen as the panacea for our industry. But how do we accomplish this?

Here’s an interesting question …who’s leading the digital transformation of your company? Consider these possible answers for your organization:

• Your CEO
• Your CTO
• Your CIO
• Covid-19

Would you like to increase ESP runlife? I think the answer for most operators would be a resounding ‘yes’, especially in a low oil price environment.

The goal with ESPs (or, for that matter, any other artificial lift method) is runlife extension.  Driving extended runlife significantly reduces artificial lift cost and Lease Operating Expense (LOE). This article will provide an overview of what we need to do differently to increase the runlife and reliability of ESPs.