Edgar Castellon, Eduardo Pereyra, and Cem Sarica, The University of Tulsa, Horizontal Wells Artificial Lift Project
Furqan Chaundhry, Ovintiv
Stuart Scott, Bob L. Herd Department of Petroleum Engineering, TTU
Mike Poythress, ConocoPhillips
Downhole separation is a critical process for proper sucker rod pump operation. This technology has been successfully applied in vertical wells, providing a solution for gas interference. New horizontal wells present a new challenge to this technology, since slug flow is a predominant flow pattern when sucker rod pumps are implemented. Many experimental studies have been conducted in the past that consider the continuous injection of gas and liquid near the separator inlet. For these cases, separators are operated continuously, and the separation efficiency is primarily measured in terms of vertical position. Thus, there is a need to develop an experimental procedure that considers the intermittent action of the sucker rod pump, as well as the inclination effect.
This paper presents a novel experimental procedure to characterize the performance of donwhole separators under the periodic behavior of a sucker rod pump. The paper describes the facility and the measurements. Computer vision algorithms are used to measure the gas void fraction entering the pump, as well as the bubble size distribution. Results for a poor boy are also presented and compared with the case of a single deep tube.