Paper: Jun Xu, Andy Cordova and Dennis Shipp, Lufkin Automation, Inc.

More and more directional wells are being drilled to maximize hydrocarbon recovery and overcome environmental restriction. Today's state of art predictive software for rod pumping can be used to design and optimize rod pumping in deviated wells as well as vertical wells. Previously, traditional methods including wave equation techniques assume that the wellbore is vertical. Applying these methods to rod pumping in deviated wells will result in substantial errors and cause inappropriate design. The new technique considers a deviation survey for the 3-D borehole trajectory and rod/tubing drag in the predictive design method. The paper examines a real case for a severely deviated well by using the new software, showing best practices, sensitivity analysis and optimization.