Brett Williams, Jeff Jenneman and Steve Gault
OXY USA Inc.
Pumping wells hard involves a tradeoff between operating cost and production. Increased idle time or holding additional back pressure on the reservoir can decrease production but pumping a well harder will likely increase failure frequency. The existing reservoir pressure has a significant impact on the potential change in production. Pump-Off Controllers (POCs) are used to regulate run time on many wells operated in Permian Basin water floods and are accepted as a failure reducing and cost saving tool. Moving set points in, changing the pump off strokes, and decreasing SPM should not affect production. Notably, conventional inflow models demonstrate that reductions in flowing bottom-hole pressure become less impactful when wells are operated at relatively low bottom-hole pressures. This paper will discuss specific examples of using POCs to pump wells gently and illustrate one mythology or calculator to evaluate the economic tradeoff.