There are many oil and gas fields across the United States which have been producing for over 100 years or more. The barriers that exist to prevent such extended field life are many. Those issues include: rod and rod pump failures, damage to the tubing, paraffin/ scale deposition and corrosion. All of these can present challenges of how to deal with the problem and correct it, while maintaining economic visibility of a field.
Tackling these issues has mostly been done using batch treatments with various preventative chemicals which over the years have proved to be expensive and not very effective as it cannot pinpoint the problem directly. More recently the use of capillary injection strings attached to the outside of the production tubing has helped to improve this situation by providing a means of injecting smaller volumes of chemical closer to the source of the problem. However, on rod pump wells the point of injection can only be made above the tubing anchor; thus failing to protect the pump and internals of the tubing string. A new design of tubing anchor is now becoming available which incorporates a pass through capability for a capillary injection string thus enabling chemical treatment capabilities for the pump as well as the rods and tubing.