Monitoring of technological processes and assessment of technical condition of pumping units

Abstract

Remote monitoring of pumping equipment operation in real mode is being widely introduced at oil and gas industry enterprises. The controllers applied in this process enable preventing progressive destruction of equipment and emergency failures and implementing automatic control of machines’ operation. The actual data collected by these controllers is transferred to the company’s servers and makes it possible to effectively set and address various tasks on equipment maintenance. However, there is still insufficient number of applications to address the problems of pumping equipment operation. The presented paper is aimed at resource efficient operation of equipment by obtaining the information on both actual and predicted technical state of the equipment in real-time mode. The main performance characteristics of a pump deteriorate in the process of its operation, followed by an increase in specific power consumption for injection (with the reservoir properties unchanged). Economic losses due to pump’s wear and tear are determined by the price of electricity and the cost of overhauling. Implementation of the designed monitoring system will make it possible to automatically decide whether further operation of the pump is unprofitable and if it needs to be overhauled. Based on the analysis of the trend of monthly unit costs, the pumping unit will be timely removed for major overhaul when the trend reaches its minimum, which shall provide an average annual economic benefit up to 4,000,000 rubles per pumping unit.