Methods, apparatus and products useful in the operation of a sucker rod pump during the production of hydrocarbons

Abstract

Apparatus, methods and products for monitoring / controlling a reciprocating well producing hydrocarbons from a wellbore, which determine the surface card from a well operating characteristics, determine the downhole card, and display both at the same scale for position.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of the Invention [0002] The present invention relates to apparatus, methods and products for the production of hydrocarbons. In another aspect, the present invention relates to methods, apparatus and products for the production of hydrocarbons with sucker rod pumps. In even another aspect, the present invention relates to methods, apparatus and products useful in the operation of a sucker rod pump during the production of hydrocarbons. [0003] 2. Description of the Related Art [0004] Hydrocarbons are often produced from wellbores by sucker rod pumps. [0005] These “sucker rod” pumps are reciprocating pumps driven from the surface by pumping units that move a polished rod up and down through a packing gland at a wellhead. The unit may be of the predominant beam type or any other type that reciprocates the polished rod. For example, a beam pumping unit utilizes a walking beam pivotally mounted on a Samson post with one end of the beam being at...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0039] It is another object of the present invention to provide for monitoring and / or operating a reciprocating well, which provide for near real time generation of a downhole card.

Problems solved by technology

While sucker rod pumps are relatively simple units, they are generally expensive to provide and maintain.

This repair is costly in terms of repair labor and parts cost, and in the terms of lost revenue from the well.

This can cause harm to the pumping system such as broken rods or damage to the drive unit or downhole pump.

Unfortunately, these simple clock timers are not responsive to changing conditions, such as changes in the reservoir, or the occurrence of abnormal operating conditions.

These abnormal conditions of sucker rod pump operation can also be detrimental to the pump, and the well efficiency, and many of these abnormal conditions can be detected by accurate monitoring of the pump operation.

The decrease in power will result in a decrease in the area of the surface dynamometer card.

A common shortcoming of the beam-mounted strain gauges is the inability of the strain gauges to differentiate between strain caused by load on the beam or metal and strain caused by changing temperature of the metal.

This problem is particularly noticeable when the strain gauge is mounted on the beam rather than the polish rod.

Because these systems eventually zero out all changes, the absolute level of load is never known, and even the load relative to a datum is not known.

A major disadvantage of all of these “surface card” methods, is that the surface card is not always an accurate representation of the downhole rod string displacement (or position) and the downhole load on the rod string.

Use of the surface card introduces errors caused by ambiguities in the surface card, the obscuring effects of downhole friction along the rods, as well as numerous other factors.

As these measurements are not possible to easily obtain, methods exist to estimate this downhole card.

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