Date

2013

Author

Aliyev, Elshan

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During the reservoir production life reservoir pressure will decline. Also after water breakthrough the fluid column weight will increase as hydrostatic pressure will increase because of increased water and oil mixture density. In this case, reservoir pressure may not be enough to lift up the fluid from bottom to the surface. These reasons decrease or even may cause to stop flowing of fluids from the well. Some techniques must be applied to prevent the production decline. Artificial lift techniques are applied to add energy to the produced fluids. It increases production rate by reducing down-hole pressure and so that by increasing the drawdown. Artificial lift techniques increase production either by pumping the produced fluid from the bottom to the surface or reduce bottom-hole pressure by reducing the fluid column weight as a result of decreased fluid mixture density. Artificial lift is used worldwide in approximately 85% of the wells, thus its impact in overall efficiency and profitability of production operations cannot be overemphasized. The most important problem is how to select optimum artificial lift techniques by taking into consideration the reservoir, well, environmental conditions. Selection of poor technique could cause decrease in efficiency and low profitability. As a result, it will lead to high operating expenses. Several techniques have been developed for selection of optimum artificial lift techniques. Expert Systems (ES) is the most suitable technique used in these selection techniques. Because the use and availability of required parameters is easy. Also in this selection method most of the artificial lift techniques are analyzed rather than other selection techniques. Expert Systems program mainly consist of three modules: (1) Expert Module, (2) Design Module, and (3) Economic Module. By entering required data to the system, program automatically suggests the feasible artificial lift techniques those might be used referring to given data. In this thesis work the artificial lift selection criteria and Expert Systems available in the literature have been studied. A Microsoft Windows based program has been developed to predict suitability of artificial lift methods for a given set of wells and produced fluid parameters. For the selected artificial lift method (i.e. sucker rod pump, ESP, gas lift, hydraulic pump, PCP) the program is able to perform basic calculations for the given data. Different case studies have been performed by running the program with actual data from fields. Well data of Venezuela, Azerbaijan and Iranian oil fields has been used in case studies. The results have been compared with previous studies those have been done on these fields with other selection techniques and current artificial lift techniques are being applied in selected wells. The obtained program results have been overlap with current real field application and previous studies.

Subject Keywords

Oil wells, Oil fields, Oil reservoir engineering., Oil saturation in reservoirs.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12615578/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/22312

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis