Larry and I finished teaching three courses of one week each. The material ranged from basic to quite advanced and the skills exercises are mostly based in WinGLUE. WinGLUE started as a tool I wrote while in Shell to do gas lift surveillance, analysis, design and optimization. With the further development and commercialization of WinGLUE by AppSmiths, it has evolved to do those things and many other things that have to do with gas lift including BHP survey analysis, gas lift valve reliability, links to automatic valve testing equipment, incorporating valve performance from the Valve Performance Clearinghouse and lately, WellTracer.
In general the students did quite well. It is always gratifying to watch them learn, especially watching the 'Aha!!' moments when they finally understand a difficult concept.
One of the more challenging topics was the analysis of WellTracer (CO2 injection) surveys, which are very useful for finding out lift depts of gas lift wells. WellTracer finds leaky valves and tubing leaks above the annular fluid level. It has even found casing leaks in a few wells. WellTracer is in use by several companies and there have been over 300 of them run in the last few years. Gas lift is very flexible and often gets very inefficient rather than failing outright, causing lost production and wasted injection gas. WellTracer is an inexpensive technique that causes zero deferment and using it requires zero intervention and and so zero risk of dropping tools in the well as is the case with wireline. As such it can be used on the full range of wells including your best wells (where no one will let you risk wireline work) and the worst wells (where instability in the well makes wireline work impossible). AppSmiths includes the analysis of WellTracer results and recommendations for the well in the cost of the survey, in most cases.
At the end of the classes Larry and I got pretty good evaluations, including:
In general the students did quite well. It is always gratifying to watch them learn, especially watching the 'Aha!!' moments when they finally understand a difficult concept.
One of the more challenging topics was the analysis of WellTracer (CO2 injection) surveys, which are very useful for finding out lift depts of gas lift wells. WellTracer finds leaky valves and tubing leaks above the annular fluid level. It has even found casing leaks in a few wells. WellTracer is in use by several companies and there have been over 300 of them run in the last few years. Gas lift is very flexible and often gets very inefficient rather than failing outright, causing lost production and wasted injection gas. WellTracer is an inexpensive technique that causes zero deferment and using it requires zero intervention and and so zero risk of dropping tools in the well as is the case with wireline. As such it can be used on the full range of wells including your best wells (where no one will let you risk wireline work) and the worst wells (where instability in the well makes wireline work impossible). AppSmiths includes the analysis of WellTracer results and recommendations for the well in the cost of the survey, in most cases.
At the end of the classes Larry and I got pretty good evaluations, including:
- "The class was awesome!"
- "Burney and Larry are very knowledgeable instructors. They are real experts."
- "I learned a lot in the class and not only about gas lift."
Teaching is hard work. That sort of feedback makes all the effort worthwhile!!
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