The Problem
Operators can spend about $10 million fracking and completing an unconventional well. The goal is to then produce the well at an appropriate rate to ensure rapid payout. When a well is planned to produce 2,000 bbl/d and then only produces 1,500 bbl/d, production is lost.
Using our software, you can tell whether this is a result of a well inflow problem or an issue with the artificial lift. Your ability to identify poorly performing artificial lift systems is critical to optimizing production.
The Solution
ALP’s Pump Checker® is a powerful analytics tool that helps you understand your data and make effective decisions to manage your artificial lift. You can use Pump Checker as a surveillance tool that can provide significant revenue increases.
Recognizing failed ESPs, identifying ESP problems resulting in less production and reducing repetitive daily downtime (e.g., power outage or facilities upset) helps keep production optimized.
Some say there’s an art to optimizing artificial lift. In our experience, it is a science that depends on accurate and appropriate data. While operators and suppliers produce plenty of figures, they’re often not the ones that are relevant to driving artificial lift improvement. And if the numbers do exist, they are so scattered across multiple systems and spreadsheets, they are unusable. Bringing it all together – even assuming you’re recording what you actually need – can be a nightmare.
After more than a decade of grappling with disparate data on many well types, we identified that there were opportunities to help our clients, by providing a systematic approach to what data they record – and more importantly, why they record it.
The result is Pump Checker®, a complete solution for artificial lift management.
Pump Checker
Pump Checker enables viewing of real-time artificial lift operating data, production information, ESP diagnosis, and runlife tracking all in one intuitive system. As a client recently said, “it puts all the information we need in one place.”
High-level dashboards and management by exception processes, combined with daily and weekly exception reports, point engineers and management directly to their problems and opportunities – saving time and allowing engineers to work on the wells that will give greatest gains.
Pump Checker automates the process of identifying such wells with problems and presents the problems and opportunities through management by exception reports that you can see within the application, or have them delivered on a daily or weekly basis to your inbox.
“ALP’s Pump Checker is a dream. It consolidates everything a production operations team needs to do their job effectively; real-time live trending of data, production well tests, operating setpoints, historical alarms and downtime, troubleshooting diagnostics, where you’re operating on your pump curve and IPR curve, highlights optimization opportunities, provides places to enter well notes to track well history and request tasks from the field, and helps track pump installation and perform detailed root cause failure analysis. It not only adds ease and convenience to my job, but also provides the tools for us to operate our artificial lift program proactively and with excellence instead of being reactionary.”
– Branden Pronk, Sr. Production Engineer, SM | Energy
Dashboards, trends (real-time monitoring), diagnostics, and analytics workflows to meet operator needs
Well monitoring
While operators and suppliers produce plenty of figures, they’re often not the ones that are relevant to driving artificial lift improvement. If the numbers do exist, they are so scattered across multiple systems and spreadsheets, they are unusable. After more than a decade of grappling with disparate data on many well types, we identified that there were opportunities to help our clients, by providing a systematic approach to what data they record – and more importantly, why they record it. Contact us to learn more about how we solve the challenges of optimizing production.
Diagnostics
Optimization takes you to a series of dashboards and reports that details production increase opportunities. As you dig down to the well level, you can see IPR’s and pump curves.
Issues in production can come from a variety of problems. Pump Checker brings opportunities together in one dashboard to make identification and decision-making faster and easier. With details on every tracked well, you can analyze ESP performance, reducing downtime and preventing the up-down cycle, which can plague wells. By monitoring daily downtime, the software can calculate missing production, and differentiate between IPR problems and actual pump failure on individual wells. This allows you to identify opportunities for improvement, and the ranking system directs you to the best prospects.
Analytics
Analytics provides you with KPI’s on runlife, install/pull frequency, and a deep dive into individual components failure heat maps.
The technology exists to help sort the data, but so often, we are not collecting the right information to help solve production and downtime problems. Automatically tracking KPIs like run life, install/pull frequency, and identifying failure modules, Pump Checker allows your team to make quick, informed decision based on real-time data. Further, by ranking the wells with the best potential opportunities for improvement, your engineers can focus on only those wells which need attention.
“The most important learning is that we are way deficient in our ESP analysis. We now have any action items that we need to work on to improve production. We have been focusing on the wrong parameters for ESP analysis.”
– Operator, West Texas, USA
How much production could you gain?
The technology exists to identify gas-lift and ESP produced wells that are losing production as a result of an undiagnosed artificial lift problem. The ability to diagnose and rectify such issues can alleviate lost production. How much could you be saving?
