LJ Guillotte, Lightning Production Solutions
Operators have been challenged in identifying physical defects or discontinuities when adopting continuous rods, in reciprocating rod pumps and PCP wells. Historically, the only method used is a visual, imprecise inspection, often resulting in running bad rod back in hole or removing good rod prematurely driving up LOE. This has been viewed as a barrier to entry for widespread adoption of continuous rod in the Permian & Delaware basins.
With LPS proprietary technology, licensed by SPScanco exclusively to LPS for Oil and Gas upstream operations, EMI scanning has enabled operators to scan continuous sucker rods, both round and semi-elliptical rod at the well site as it is being pulled out of hole without any delay to workover operations successfully for the past 3 years by LPS. Due to its size, functionality, accuracy, user friendly MMI with built in local intelligence, LPS’s EMI system is easily installed in a matter of minutes, scanning in real time capturing and storing data at a high rate is used to identify discontinuities in CR’s. With this next generation of LPS’s EMI technology, consisting of its own datalogger, chassis & sensors and software. This paper will discuss proven case studies where operators have used the data to make critical decisions to retire or rerun the rod as well used for predictive failure analysis.