Abstract
Nowadays, unloading gas wells with coiled tubing is a common application to the field. However, it still lacks of adequate understanding of dynamic behavior of the unloading process. This paper investigates the process of liquid unloading by gas lift with coiled tubing under transient conditions. This unloading process can be divided into three stages: liquid rising in tubing, liquid slug production, and liquid production by entrainment. In each stage, the mass and conversation equations are applied as governing equations. The components of each stage include coiled tubing, coiled tubing-tubing annulus, liquid slug, gas bubble, and liquid film. Empirical correlations have been used for surface gas injection choke, check valve, friction factor, the relationship between the gas bubble and the liquid slug velocity, inflow performance relationship, and black oil fluid properties. From the above, the dynamic model coupling real-time change of inflow performance relationship is developed. The lower upper (LU) factorization and Euler's method are applied to solve the proposed dynamic model in time domain. Among all these variables, the most important ones include gas injection rates, pressures at various locations, length of the liquid slug and gas bubble, and phase velocities. Through the simulation efforts, the mechanism of liquid unloading process is revealed.Gas lift is commonly constrained by gas availability. This is a pioneering study on liquid unloading with coiled tubing. The results can be applied to design coiled tubing gas lift to optimize the usage of injected gas, choose appropriate pump, and save the energy consumed in gas lift operation.
Published Version
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