Economical and Performance Evaluation Between Sucker Rod Pumps and Progressive Cavity Units for Heavy Oil Production in Some Syrian Fields

Abstract

Heavy oil reservoirs have become one of the most important energy sources lately. However, the consumption of these sources requires special methods due to the heavy oil conditions. Therefore, various mechanical methods were used, including sucker rod pumps that were able to deal with heavy oil until A certain degree of viscosity causing frequent interruptions of the pumping rods as a result of the tension and contraction of these rods during the up and down stroke. In addition to this, the low production rate of heavy oil, so in order to deal with this problem, the technology has turned towards progressive cavity pumps .in this paper will highlight of the SRP/PCP where this research aims to use progressive cavity pump units as an alternative to sucker rod units for heavy oil production and economic comparison was made between them in terms of costs, operating requirements and the time period required to recover these costs. results have shown the superiority of progressive cavity pumps in term of performance and 50% of the costs of sucker rod pumps were sufficient for the application of progressive units and these pumps were able to achieve significant economic savings compared to sucker rod units.