Artificial Lift Performance Blog

“A few weeks ago we reposted an article by Scott Wilson on “Why We Matter”, continuing the theme I’d like to repost another excellent SPE article on “The Future Need for Petroleum Engineering”. This article presents an optimistic future, that can help us continue to hire great talent into our industry.

One of the questions we frequently get from graduates during hiring is “Isn’t your industry dead”, or worse the death blow statement “I thought you made software, I didn’t realise you’re oil and gas, I’m not interested!”.

One of the nice things about gaslift, is that events that cause lost production, can sometimes be resolved by performing troubleshooting at surface. I like to quote JPT Emerging Technology Senior Editor, Stephen Rassenfoss:

“When a gas lift system starts performing poorly, there is a good chance no one will notice. It is not an event that demands attention like a broken pump. A gas lift system will continue injecting gas into wells and oil will continue to come out. Just not as much oil as there could be.....”

If you happen to notice that your well is producing less fluid, there are things you can do to troubleshoot the issue. This article will focus on Troubleshooting Gas Lift Wells.

With 50 years experience, Tom Nations is an expert in Gas-Lift and NODAL Analysis. In our latest guest article, Tom breaks down the process of trouble-shooting surface problems on a Gas-lifted well. He explains how carrying out the correct checks and diagnosing these issues early can avoid the added expense of having to perform a costly workover.

This blog was inspired by a posting by Jim Hall (retired Shell Gaslift SME) on LinkedInin 2020 where he shared his tally book-sized gas lift best practices. We’ve taken his ideas and given them a little bit of an update for modern technology and tools. We hope you find this useful. 

Gas lift is an appropriate and effective lift method for many well types, especially gassy wells. Robust and reliable, gas lift wells continue to produce — even when operating inefficiently. However, this also creates a huge opportunity— if we can diagnose when a gas lift well is being operated sub-optimally then it gives us an opportunity to recover a missing wedge of production. You do not have to let lower production be the norm — using these best practices you can improve the management of your gas lift wells and data to maximize your well production.

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.