Improved method on hydraulic power calculations for conventional sucker rod pumping system

Abstract

The annual energy consumption of suck rod pumping units in China is more than 10 billion kWh, but the average efficiency is only about 25-31%. Limited information is known, about the efficiency of various components of the pumping unit. The current methods for calculating the hydraulic power neglect the effect of friction and free gas. This research introduces an improved method for calculating hydraulic power which takes into account the effect of friction and free gas. The model was obtained from the product of two parameters which were, predicted pressure increased by the downhole pump and predicted flow rate. The pressure increased by the pump was obtained by the nodal analysis approach in which the concepts of multiphase flow were included. The Computer program was developed and all calculations in this paper were computed by this program developed from python programming language version 3.5. This model was compared with the previous models and showed that, the previous models underestimated the hydraulic power since the influence of gas and friction were not included.