Comparative analysis of effectiveness in implementation of natural drive and artificial lift methods for hydrocarbon production

Abstract

Living in a world where energy consumption is increasing rapidly, the need for petroleum is also escalating to meet this high demand. To optimize and enhance hydrocarbon production oil companies are trying to apply best suitable production techniques in producing oil and gas fields. However, achieving maximum hydrocarbon production under different technical and economic difficulties is a great challenge for production engineers. When the production profiles are generated for a production well under different scenarios, the relationship between reservoir performance and tubing performance should be considered in such a way that the modelled well will be able to produce hydrocarbons efficiently and well production rate will be stable. There are different production techniques that can be selected to produce hydrocarbons from subsurface formations. Reservoir fluids can be lifted to the surface by either the means of natural energy available within the reservoir itself or they can be lifted by applying artificial lift methods. Despite the fact that hydrocarbons are generally produced by natural drive mechanism at the initial stage of field development where the reservoir pressures are strong enough to push hydrocarbons to the surface and then suitable artificial lifting techniques are implemented when the wells cannot flow naturally, artificial lifting can also be applied to maximize production rate when individual well production rate is low due to lower reservoir pressure available in the system. The main objective of this thesis work is to do comparative analysis of effectiveness in implementation of natural drive and artificial lift methods (gas – lift and pumps) for hydrocarbon production in West Absheron oil field, which is located in Absheron archipelago, the Caspian Sea, by using a special computer software package (namely PROSPER) on the basis of a synthetic well data, namely Well WA-1. The Nodal Analysis is done for natural drive case and artificial lift techniques, specifically said, electrical submersible pump method and continuous gas lifting on PROSPER. Darcy method is used to construct inflow performance relationship curve (IPR) for reservoir performance and Petroleum Experts 2 method is selected to construct vertical lift performance (VLP) curve and intersection point between these two curves through system calculations menu is obtained (known as nodal analysis) for natural drive and artificial lift techniques, specifically said, electrical submersible pump method and continuous gas lifting.