Key words: electrical submersible pump (ESP), erosive wear of ESP, simulation, degradation of ESP characteristics, sand production and proppant flowback.
An acceleration of oil production creates significant challenges for electrical submersible pumps. The main challenges for the pumps in high drawdown applications are accelerated pump wear and early failures caused by sand production and proppant flowback. Therefore, sand control considerations are very important for effective production acceleration of artificially lifted wells. Furthermore, an effective decision making on lifting and sand control technologies requires accurate models for pump runlife estimation and pump head & efficiency degradation due to sand production. This paper presents a new dynamic model for the pump head & efficiency estimation under long-term erosion conditions. The model allows to take into account the pump wear estimation during artificial lift selection and thus it enables pumps runlife improvement and operating costs reduction.
