New downhole combination improves pumping of gassy wells,
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By Watson Packer

Pumping wells that have a high gas oil ratio have been a challenge for operators everywhere because when the gas goes through the pump it decreases the efficiency of the pump. In many cases, the gas causes the pump to become gas locked.

When a downhole pump is gas locked it does not move any oil to the surface. Some operators solved this problem by installing a gas separator below the pump. The gas seperator helps to make the gas flow up the casing instead of going through the pump. This works very well and usually increases both oil and gas production.

The problem is that a packer must be run below the separator to make it work. Conventional packers were tried for this but none of them worked very well. That's because the constant movement of the pump would often cause them to fail. They were also hard to get out of the well because of corrosion, wear, scale and sand in the well bore.

One operator asked Watson Packer to develop a packer that would work in these conditions. Harold Clifton had the idea to make a packer with no slips and very few moving parts and use a proven tubing anchor to anchor the packer to the casing.

This worked very well bacause, after the anchor and packer are set, there is no movement to cause the packer to fail. The packer also protects the tubing anchor from debris and makes it easier to release.

The first packer was run in July 2004 and, since then, 175 more have been run in the Midland area. Many of these packers have been pulled out of the wells to repair tubing leaks and retrieve stuck pumps since then with a minimum amount of problems.