SPE-185136-MS

You Don't Know Pumps: Myths and Truths about ESP Operation in
High-Gas Environments

Michael A. Dowling, Perenco

Copyright 2017, Society of Petroleum Engineers

This paper was prepared for presentation at the SPE Electric Submersible Pump Symposium held in The Woodlands, Texas, USA, 24-28 April 2017.

This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents
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Abstract
ESP's are a technology that was adapted from water pumping in order to continue to produce high-rate,
high-water cut wells with economic results. Using centrifugal pumps in wells that produce hydrocarbons
creates the possibility, perhaps the inevitability, of centrifugal pumps that need to produce multiphase fluid,
and originally this was a common limitation for their use. Gradually, the industry developed solutions to
increase the capacity for ESP's to work in the presence of gas through technology (static gas separators,
dynamic gas separators, and most recently multi-phase pump stages) and through simulations of ESP's in
high-gas conditions to understand their behavior.
The result is a set of historical concepts on the performance and behavior of ESP's with high-gas that
gets passed down among generations of engineers who work for suppliers and producing companies.
This paper's premise is that many of the beliefs about how ESP's operate in high-gas environments are
mythological. They are learned early by engineers in the industry and accepted as true and unquestioned,
even when presented with direct evidence that contradicts them. This paper will use conflicting examples
to demonstrate that behavior is much more complex and unpredictable than previously considered.
Perenco is an independent oil company whose strategy is to reinject life into mature oil assets. ESP's are
a central part of Perenco's business because they offer an opportunity to boost flow rate for older wells with
decreased reservoir pressure and high water cuts. Converting high-gas wells to ESP's has resulted in the
opportunities for the examples in this paper.

Myth 1: By Forcing Gas through an ESP, you will benefit from the Gas Lift
Effect
Perhaps this is more the debunking of a sales pitch than a myth, but this is something that I learned early and
believed to be true for a long time. While the conventional solution of separating the liquid and gas have
proven effective for decades, the recent development of multi-phase downhole pumps for ESP's has created
this misconception. The idea is that if the pump can pass the free gas through it instead of separating it,
then the discharge pressure (back pressure) will be lower and, for the same speed, we'll be able to increase
the flow rate from the well.
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While it's completely true that increasing the amount of gas going through the tubing will decrease the
discharge pressure, unfortunately, the gas also decreases pump efficiency and increases the total volume
through the pump. In every case we've seen, the net result is a decrease in flow rate. Here are two examples:

Example 1
Well 1 is a high-productivity/low water cut well that used a high-rate ESP with a gas separator and multi-
phase device installed below an annular packer. In early July 2013, the annular vent valve in the packer had
a control line leak and closed. Figure 1, below, shows the reaction of the pump. After a shutdown and restart,
discharge pressure stabilized about 200-psi lower than before. Unfortunately, intake pressure increased as
well, stabilizing about 100-psi higher, and the well production dropped by about 1000-bpd of liquid. We'll
come back to this well later.

Figure 1—Continued stable operation after packer vent valve malfunction.

Example 2
Well 2 is a high-rate, high-productivity, high water cut well that was suffering from unstable gas production
in the casing and unstable intake pressure. Like well 1, it used a gas separator and multi-phase device. We
hypothesized that the unstable intake pressure was due to the gas slugs in the casing, so we choked the
annulus to see if it would stabilize the ESP operation. The results were nearly immediate: the well stabilized
as we had hoped and discharge pressure reduced, indicating that the gas was going through the ESP. But
intake pressure was higher than previously, and we lost some flow as a result. Figure 2 shows the behavior
of the pressures and temperatures when the annulus was first choked. Note that the well destabilized later
because we had to re-open the annulus valve when we exceeded its pressure rating with the valve partially
closed.
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Figure 2—improved stability by choking casing vent. The scale on

the plot is about 18 hours and the vertical gridlines are 1 hour apart.

As these two examples demonstrate, forcing extra gas through the ESP definitely decreases the discharge
pressure, but the net effect is not to increase the flow rate from the well. For a given speed, the resulting
degradation in pump performance outweighs the benefits of gas lift effect in the tubing. Power consumption
does decrease with the extra gas, so technically, it should be possible to consider the pump degradation and
gain in barrels per unit power, but as the next section shows, the consequences of forcing gas through the
pump can be unpredictable.

Myth 2: You know what's going to Happen When you Close an Annulus
Valve
We all know the basic sequence of events that will happen when you close the annulus on an ESP well
that is venting the annulus with free gas at the intake: the gas will build up in the annulus and push the
fluid level down. Eventually – and it's a matter of when, and not if – the fluid level will reach the pump
intake. Unfortunately for ESP users, what happens next is very complicated and we don't presently have
a way to predict it. Examples 1 and 2 show behavior where the ESP continued operating stably but with
a decreased flow rate. In fact, example 2 shows a case where stability increased because of the extra gas
going through the pump.
Now for some counter examples.

Example 3
Well 3 is a low-productivity well with an ESP that uses a gas separator, a multi-phase pump, and a shroud.
The wellhead uses an unfortunate design where the annulus valve closes with counter-clockwise rotation
(turn to the left) and opens with clockwise rotation (turn right). In December 2013, while discussing the
potential impact of a gas injection campaign on the field, a glance at the present operation told us something
wasn't right. In figure 3, you can see that, everything was normal after a regular restart and pump intake
pressure was slowly stabilizing until, suddenly, intake pressure took an abrupt turn, discharge pressure had
a blip, and motor temperature and amperage went unstable. The platform confirmed that the annulus valve
was turned to the left – what they thought was fully open. Then they realized the error and opened the
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annulus valve, upon which ESP and well performance returned to normal. This ESP operated like this for
8 days without anyone noticing, including the supplier-operated surveillance center that we use to improve
ESP operation.

Figure 3—loss of production and increased instability with closed annulus valve.

In this case, as you can see, the ESP continued to operate and produce fluid despite the closed annulus
valve, but the pump progressively lost effectiveness and operated in what we call ‘pumping/not-pumping’
mode. Figure 4, below, shows a zoom-in on the behavior from 08-Dec-2013 so that intake pressure instability
and pumping (intake pressure decreasing)/not pumping (intake pressure increasing) behavior are easier to
see.

Figure 4—Shorter view of unstable operation with closed annulus valve.

SPE-185136-MS 5

Example 4
Well 4 is in the same field as Well 3 and we noticed the unusual operation at the same time as that of Well
3, as we were trying to evaluate present performance of ESP's in the field. Like Well 3, it also uses an ESP
with a gas separator and a multi-phase pump device, but unlike Well 3, it is a high productivity well and
has a significant distance between the pump setting depth and the production zone.
As you will see in figure 5, the instability of the ESP behavior is shocking. The buildup/quick drop in
intake pressure tells us that the pump is only intermittently pumping, and the discharge behavior swings
between 1800-psi and 700-psi, even occasionally dropping below intake pressure. As with Well 3, after a
phone call to the platform, they opened the annular valve and the well operation returned to normal. And
as with Well 3, no one noticed this well's operation for at least a week, including the surveillance service.

Figure 5—Continued production but huge instability after closed annulus valve.

Example 5
Well 5 is a well that, like wells 3 and 4, used an ESP with a gas separator and a multi-phase device. The
well productivity is complex because of its mixture of high-productivity fractures in an otherwise low-
productivity matrix. In May 2015, the hydraulic control line for its packer vent valve developed a leak and
the valve closed, which stopped annular gas venting. Unlike the other examples in this section, this ESP
simply gas locked immediately once the fluid level reached the intake. Within a few hours, the site crew
had identified the problem and reopened the valve, only for the problem to reoccur about six hours later,
followed by a shutdown when the problem could not be resolved again. Subsequent restart attempts failed
to reestablish flow, as the accumulated gas bubble in the annulus resulted in gas lock before the pump could
get fluid to surface.
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Figure 6—Gas Lock with closed annular valve.

And so here we have five examples of ESP's that behave differently to the same change: closing the
annulus valve. Wells 1 and 2 were very similar, with sustained stable, or even improved stabilized operation,
albeit at a reduced rate. Well 3 slowly lost pump effectiveness while continuing to produce with less stable
operation while well 4 continued to produce but with huge fluctuations in operation. And a fifth well gas
locked immediately with no way to continue fluid production to surface.
I have no doubt that each well's reaction to the closed valve was inevitable considering its own particular
set of conditions (reservoir pressure, productivity, water cut, GOR, pump stage type and operating speed,
deviation, casing size, depth difference between producing zone and pump, etc.) and that the specific
reaction is not simply a role of the dice among various possibilities. But the set of variables that determines
how the well reacts is a complex mystery. Importantly, if your strategy to produce a well depends on being
able produce free gas through the ESP, you can't count on it working.

Myth 3: Gas Locking is a Function of Gas into the Pump

The standard understanding of gas locking is that it works something like this:
1. The pump is already operating with a lot of gas going through the pump.
2. Either
a. Something, like a gas slug or a closed annulus valve, causes the amount of gas at the pump intake
to increase, or
b. Something causes the pump to produce more head than it can
3. As a result the pump gas locks and stops creating pressure.
To start with, I propose that we reconsider our definition of gas lock. First of all, it is impossible for the
pump to stop creating pressure because there is a tubing full of liquid and gas above it. For the pump to
stop creating pressure, then all the liquid in the tubing would need to disappear. As an alternative, I propose
to define gas locking as:

Gas Lock: when a gas bubble forms at the bottom of the ESP that stops all liquid flow into the pump.
SPE-185136-MS 7

Note that my proposed definition doesn't include anything about what causes gas lock. In the previous
section, Example 5 was a classic demonstration of long-duration gas lock that is close to the standard
understanding of what happens. But notice that pump definitely does not stop creating pressure. It creates
just enough pressure to hold the liquid in the tubing above it. The amount of pressure it produced varied,
however. The first two were very similar, while the gas lock when attempting to restart produced only a
tiny amount of pressure. Further, example 5 is a good demonstration of an ESP that gas locks and does not
recover, but there are other possibilities. In fact, examples 3 and 4 are mostly likely cases where the ESP
is gas locking (no more flow entering the pump) and recovering very quickly. Those examples all have in
common the same cause: annular gas venting has stopped and the gas/fluid contact has reached the intake.
Gas locking doesn't need any severe provocation and can happen with no warning.

Example 6
Well 6 is a well with moderate productivity and high water cut with an ESP that uses a gas separator
but no multi-phase device. It was operating stably and then suddenly, with no warning gas locked. In
this case, happily, the ESP recovered quickly and reestablished the previous flowing conditions with zero
manipulation of the well (no speed change, no surface choke change). The gas lock lasted about 12 minutes
if you count the time from the beginning of the increase in intake pressure to the sharp inflection point on
intake pressure, indicating that the pump started behaving normally again. The changes to discharge pressure
and amperage were little more than blips, and you can hardly notice the changes to the temperature trends.
Interestingly, upon resuming operation, intake pressure dropped below the value where the ESP gas locked.

Figure 7—Sudden temporary gas lock.

Example 7
Well 7 is a moderate productivity, low water cut well that uses an ESP with a gas separator and a multi-phase
device. Like well 6, the well gas locked with zero prior warning. Suddenly, intake pressure is increasing.
Also like well 6, the pump recovered quickly (about 30 minutes in this example) without any manipulation.
Unlike well 6, the drop in amperage is pronounced and the drop in discharge pressure is huge. Further, about
ten minutes into the gas lock, the rate of change of intake pressure starts behaving strangely and discharge
8 SPE-185136-MS

pressure starts following intake pressure, which means that, according to my definition, it's probably not
gas locked anymore, but it's not behaving normally, either.

Figure 8—Sudden longer gas lock, still temporary

Example 8
Well 8 is a well similar to well 5. It has a complex well productivity with high-productivity fractures in
a low-productivity matrix and uses an ESP with a gas separator and multi-phase device. The ESP in this
well was constantly cycling between gas locked behavior (low amps and discharge pressure) and producing
(high amps and discharge pressure) without manipulation of speed or valve settings.
We watched the behavior for days and attempted to stabilize this behavior through speed manipulation,
first by decreasing the speed to avoid pumping too fast. But that didn't change the behavior significantly.
We noticed that the first thing to happen during gas lock was that the discharge pressure would start to
drop, and that was the beginning of the loss of stability. Then intake pressure would increase slightly(less
than 1 psi). Then amperage would drop, followed by a drop in intake pressure, on the order of 4 to 5 psi.
Eventually, the pump would recover and start pumping again, and pump intake pressure increased when
the pump was pumping.
In an attempt to fight the loss of stability, we tried to accelerate to compensate once discharge pressure
started dropping, but that just delayed the inevitable gas lock. Without any other options, we theorized that
the gas lock started because we lost stability in the tubing above the pump, so we choked the tubing at
surface. And the ESP stopped gas locking.
SPE-185136-MS 9

Figure 9—Cyclic gas lock apparently initiated by tubing instability

Example 9
A final example of gas lock is well 9, which gas locked four times over the period of a couple months, each
one resulting in an automatic shutdown on low amperage. The intake and discharge pressure behavior of
the four gas locks are presented in figure 10 with a time reference relative to the time of the shutdown. Each
set of intake and discharge pressure are color coordinated to be similar to each other.

Figure 10—Four gas locks on same well with varying behavior.

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The second and fourth gas locks were very similar, particularly on intake pressure behavior, which
was slowly oscillating before becoming unstable, with only a few psi difference between them. And the
discharge pressures were similar as well, both oscillating and going unstable like intake pressure, but with
higher amplitudes and a bigger difference between the two instances. Regardless, if you saw only these two
behaviors, you would probably conclude that you have gas lock figured out for this well.
But then there are the first and third gas locks. The first one had very stable pressures until a very slight
destabilization, then a quick gas lock that fixed itself after about 2 minutes before the final gas lock. And
the third gas lock started with something causing PIP to slowly increase 40 minutes before the final gas
lock, and accelerating the gain in intake pressure 10 minutes before the gas lock.
To summarize, there are a lot of ways that an ESP can gas lock. It can completely and permanently stop
flow from your ESP, like what happened to well 5 when the annular packer valve closed, or it can fix itself
quickly as in wells 6 and 7. You can have cycles of pumping/gas locking behavior like in well 8 and likely
wells 3 and 4 or it can be a single quick gas lock as with wells 6 and 7. It can be caused by a closed annular
valve that forces the fluid level to the pump (wells 3, 4, and 5) or it can happen with no apparent underlying
reason (wells 6, 7, and 9), or it might even be related to the behavior of the fluid in the tubing above the
pump (well 8). Discharge pressure can drop only slightly or severely. And even a single well with the same
pump can demonstrate different behavior during gas lock (well 9). But two thing are always the same: at
the beginning, no more fluid goes into the pump, and the pump still creates pressure.
As with the conclusion on the closed annular valve, I have little doubt that each well's gas lock and the
pump's reaction to gas lock (does it break? How long? Drop in PDP, etc.) were inevitable given the specific
set of conditions at the time. But we don't know what conditions will result in gas lock. Or at least, if anyone
has figured it out, they haven't shared it.

Truth: ESP's Operating with High Gas can defy our understanding of ESP
behavior
By now, if I haven't convinced you that ESP operation with gas is more complex than you previously
believed, I hope that I have at least shaken your confidence. To recap, two things that we think of as relatively
concrete can be quite unpredictable:

• A pump can react to a closed annular valve in one of many ways: improved stability with minor
loss of flow, continued stable operation with decreased efficiency, unstable operation with loss of
flow, rapid cyclic gas locking, and permanent gas locking are some of the examples presented here.
• Gas locking, which we tend to simplify as the pump stopping to produce because of the amount of
gas at the intake, can take many forms and have many causes. It can be caused by the fluid level
dropping to the intake, or loss of stability in the tubing above it, or even it can happen without any
apparent cause. Once it starts, it can break rapidly by itself (minutes), or maybe longer (30 to 40
minutes), or it can last for hours, or not break at all unless the ESP is stopped. It can be cyclic,
repeating with extremely regular periodicity, or it can happen once, fix itself, and not repeat.
Now consider two examples that are beyond explanation with our understanding of ESP’s.

Example 10
Here we revisit well 1, the ESP that lost production when the annular valve malfunctioned and closed,
but managed to remain producing stably. Knowing that the flow rate was limited because of the gas going
through the pump, and attempts to increase speed having been ineffective, we considered that we could
increase the flow rate by installing a new, larger-diameter surface line and reduce the tubing-head pressure.
This should reduce the discharge pressure and therefore increase the flow rate that the pump could achieve.
SPE-185136-MS 11

With the new flowline installed, we swapped the well to the low-pressure/high-diameter line, only to watch
the following results.

Figure 11—Unexpected Pure Discharge Pressure Drop as a result of lowering surface pressure.

As expected, the discharge pressure dropped to account for the drop in surface pressure. There are
even sudden drops immediately upon switching where the discharge pressure drops way lower than intake
pressure, likely as the surface line is filling. What was unexpected was the complete lack of reaction on
the pump intake pressure. To this day, I still don't understand how this is possible. I regret the fact that
we couldn't get discharge pressure even lower because I'm curious about whether the pump could operate
stably with a negative delta-P.

Example 11
As a final example of unusual high gas behavior, consider well 10, an ESP installed in an unusual completion
that uses a deep-set non-vented packer in the annulus and a lower-completion packer with a flapper valve
to prevent fluid losses into the formation during a workover. The ESP uses a multiphase device but no gas
separator, since the annulus is closed. The completion creates a fluid pocket for the ESP that is isolated
from the reservoir pressure and, the ESP can create nearly instantaneous changes in intake pressure when
the valve is closed. Here is a screenshot of the behavior of the ESP for about 7 hours following the start-
up, taken from the high-frequency on-site data system.
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Figure 12—Unusual intake pressure behavior on non-vented application.

The scale on the plot is 8 hours. You can see that the intake pressure drops immediately upon startup
(about 1000-psi). What you can't tell from the graph alone is that, after the quick pressure drop at start-up, the
pump is ‘frozen’. It's not producing fluid to surface but there might be a very small amount of flow. As you
can see, intake pressure and discharge pressure are basically constant for four hours. The motor temperature
(magenta) increases significantly relative to the intake temperature (red), which actually drops relative to
static and producing levels. Motor temperature doesn't increase continually as in most no-flow or gas lock
situations. Temperatures are hard to see on this figure but you can see them more clearly in Figure 13.

Figure 13—Unusual behavior of non-vented application, including PIP reaction to speed change.

Then, suddenly, intake pressure drops as the pump is pumping again. Discharge pressure builds up over
an hour and a half, potentially because the tubing is filling, or maybe because water is displacing oil in the
tubing. Once the discharge pressure stabilizes, the pump intake pressure behavior changes again and starts
an extraordinary castellated form. As previously mentioned, this figure is a screen shot of the local high-
SPE-185136-MS 13

frequency data system. The remote surveillance system doesn't capture data fast enough to show the form
of the pump intake pressure.
Intrigued by this behavior, I was determined to stabilize the operation, and defeated. By overlaying pump
intake pressure, amperage, and tubing head pressure, we think that the drop in intake pressure corresponds
with the pump suddenly starting to produce liquid and that the flat intake pressure corresponds to no flow
at surface. We hypothesized that the pump was simply pumping too fast and would benefit from a decrease
in frequency. Instead of stabilizing, the entire pump intake pressure form stabilized at a higher level. As
with the behavior of well 1 in example 10, I'm at a loss to explain the behavior: the ‘frozen’ behavior with
such low pump intake pressure, the unusual form of the pumping/not-pumping behavior, and why the intake
pressure would stabilize under no-flow or low-flow at a pressure lower than static pressure. We can come up
with wild hypotheses (oil/water slugging from the reservoir, slight leak of lower flapper valve creating very
slow but cold (due to Joule-Thompson effect) inlet of fluid), but we lack enough examples to confirm them.
Figure 13, below, shows the start-up through the following two days, including the attempts to stabilize
flow by manipulating speed (1-Hz). In includes separate axes for temperatures, so you can see the
temperature differences between the ‘frozen’ period and when the pump starts pumping again.

Conclusions
To summarize:

• Many of the basic beliefs about ESP behavior with gas are oversimplified, if not wrong.

• In reality, fundamental concepts like a pump's reaction to a closed valve, what causes gas locking
are complex – way more complex – than we have considered.
• In fact, ESP behavior in high gas can be so unusual that it can cause you to question what you
know about pump and fluid behavior.
• Much of our understanding of ESP behavior with gas comes from laboratory testing. Unfortunately,
laboratory testing of ESP behavior often failed to consider the effect of 1000's of feet of tubing
full of high pressure gas, water, and oil, above the ESP. In most cases, your ESP simply cannot
change its discharge pressure instantaneously. To do so would require all of that fluid to disappear
or reappear.
• People learn basic ideas on these complex situations early before they have a chance to question
it, then they to hold onto it and pass it along to others. It's human nature that we refuse to question
what we learned initially about pump behavior, even when confronted with direct evidence to the
contrary.
• Pumps will tell you what's happening if you know how to listen.