Nurbol Bekbossinov, Nelson, Ruis, Mohammad Masadeh, Mohamed Hamoud and Diego Hernandez
Baker Hughes
The objective of this paper is to present oil and gas industry the advancement and improvement of the Baker Hughes ESP phase system on wells with relatively high GLR, moderate water cut, and suggest considering the presented design system in comparable wells for an extended run-life. Paper presents run-life analysis and comparison of a conventional design versus the phase system in terms of power consumption, cost savings, and reductions of the emissions due to differences in surface power consumption between two different ESP systems. Operator after installing the standard design for given well output conditions eventually decided to test the new system on their well to minimize maintenance and avoid consecutive shutdowns on multiple occasions. Three wells will with phase system will be presented in detail to showcase the results and performance improvements. The baseline for the case study is chosen to be real running parameters of three units at different timeframes. Real electrical and mechanical parameters are used to match in-house software and produce power consumption and pump operating conditions which are crucial for a unit run life and therefore operator’s capital investment. In short, it is observed that with an initial design of low GLR, high water cut, and high total liquid rate for a given well standard pump design has been failing to perform and reasons will be discussed later. Further in time, as water cut remained relatively the same on average, total liquid production dropped, while GLR increased, phase system showed better performance and more optimistic expectations of unit run life. Running old design at late time production system at the same frequency indicated more power consumption and therefore higher capital expenditure. The performance of new design allowed for a frequency increase of 7-15% which allowed for more drawdown. This indicates the improvement in power consumption and in turn suggests better efficiency of recovery. The design discussed in this paper is relatively new to the industry and it aims to reinforce and support previous publications. Purpose is to show an implementation of this design on a new case with real performance evaluations. It may be beneficial for number of operators to consider this type of design in their future ESP applications at mid-to-end life of their wells.