When a well is completed, it must be cleared of sand before it’s production can be lined up to the collection laterals. This is accomplished by “flowing-back”, or “flaring”, the well. For a typical gas well, this requires venting the tubing to the atmosphere for 3 or 4 days at a typical rate of 5… Read More »
Figure 2—2 shows how high pressure gas from the tubing side of dual completion can be employed to compress the low pressure casing gas. An ejector, an apparatus in common use in process plants, acts as a compressor without moving parts. The installed cost of the apparatus pictured in figure 2-2, is less than $10,000,… Read More »
By perforating the casing both below and above the packer, as shown in figure 2-1, a lease operator can produce natural gas from two different zones simultaneously. Thus, a dual completion can double the intiial gas flow from a well. If, as often happens, the formation being drained by the tubing is depleted first, a… Read More »
“Mendoza, this meter is broken”, I complained. “Every time we increase the compressors speed to pull-down the wellhead pressure, the recorded gas flow drops. I just raised the rpm from 375 to 425, and the wellhead pressure fell from 220 PSIG to 15 PSIG. But the metered flow decreased from 180 MSCFD to 150 MSCFD.… Read More »
One of the more puzzling phenomenon I have observed in gas field production happened during my tenure as an operator of wellhead compressors. One would intuitively assume that the faster the wellhead compressor ran, the more gas would be delivered through the sales meter. Normally, as the compressor speed was increased by manually screwing open… Read More »