Herald Winkler, Consultant
Gas lift is a flexible and forgiving form of artificial lift. Gas lift is so flexible that many installations for offshore platform wells are designed and the retrievable gas lift valve mandrels are installed during initial well completion. Efficient gas lift operations can be anticipated from installation designs based on limited well performance data by avoiding excessive distance between valve depths. The daily production rate from most gas lift installations depends upon the well deliverability and the available injection gas pressure and rate. The gas lift designs and systems described in this paper are not typical installations that are discussed in gas lift textbooks. The design concepts are not original and most of the information has been published in years past. The same innovative ideas reappear in cycles and will seem new to the engineer who has recently entered the petroleum industry. This paper brings together the description of several unusual gas lift applications into a single publication. Hopefully, one of these special installation designs will be a solution to a present artificial lift problem. Modification of an installation design tailored to a particular well or field is left to the reader.