At present, the optimization of the plunger mechanism is shale gas wells is mostly based on empirical methods, which lack a relevant rationale and often are not able to deal with the quick variations experienced by the production parameters of shale gas wells in comparison to conventional gas wells. In order to mitigate this issue, in the present work, a model is proposed to loosely couple the dynamics of gas inflow into shale gas wells with the dynamics of the liquid inflow. Starting from the flow law that accounts for the four stages of movement of the plunger, a dynamic model of the plunger lift based on the real wellbore trajectory is introduced. The model is then tested against 5 example wells, and it is shown that the accuracy level is higher than 90%. The well 'switch' , optimized on the basis of simulations based on such a model, is tested through on-site experiments. It is shown that, compared with the original switch configuration, the average production of the sample well can be increased by about 15%.
The problem of efficient gas lift for gas well annulus packers that rely on their own energy plungers is considered. The complex related gas-liquid problem is addressed in the frame of model where the gas inflow dynamics and liquid inflow dynamics of the considered shale gas wells are weakly coupled. On this basis, and with the aiding support of indoor simulation experimental data, a new gas plunger lift design taking into account liquid leakage is obtained. Finally, a dedicated software relying on this approach is developed and used to verify the reliability of the model by means of field examples.
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