Gas Lift for Horizontal Gas Well Deliquification
Jayanth Nair, Research Assistant, Ph.D. Candidate
Gas lift is a very common artificial lift technique used in the industry for solving liquid loading problems. In conventional applications such as in oil wells, gas lifting operates by lightening the liquid column, and consequently lowering the hydrostatic pressure in the tubing and enabling natural flow of fluids out of the wellbore. In gas well applications however, the main purpose of gas lifting is to increase the in-situ gas rate above the critical rate for liquid removal. Lea et al. (2008) provide some guidelines for this type of gas lift application.
The main objective of this project is to study the effect of several design parameters on gas lift performance in horizontal gas wells. This includes lateral geometry, end of tubing (EOT) location, injection location, gas injection rate and the presence of a packer in the system. These effects will be studied experimentally using the large pipe diameter facility (6-in. ID lateral section) constructed by TUHWALP and later modelled mechanistically. Studies using commercial transient multiphase software are also being conducted as a part of this project.