6.0: Lesson Overview

You will have two weeks to complete Lesson 6.

Lesson 6 is very extensive, and you will have two weeks to read through the lesson and complete the associated assignments. Please use your time wisely and don't let yourself fall behind; you will need the extra week to work your way effectively through the material.

Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates.

In this lesson, we will discuss fluid flow in the oil and gas wells. Production Engineers are concerned with optimizing production from a given well. Well Modeling is a tool that allows production engineers to determine production rates and pressure drops in a well. This allows the engineer to identify bottlenecks in the production system (reservoir, tubing, well head) and seek methods to alleviate these bottlenecks (debottleneck the well).

Production engineers use tubing calculations and well modeling during all phases of the well’s productive life - from designing the initial completion to developing well intervention strategies as conditions in the reservoir change (pressure and saturations).

Learning Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

list and understand the different well orientations used to produce crude oil and natural gas;
describe the basics of tubing hydraulics (fluid flow in well tubing) during crude oil and natural gas production;
state the physical parameters that impact pressure losses in well tubing;
discuss the different flow regimes that can occur in vertical and horizontal flow through well tubing;
explain the concept of the energy balance and how it relates to tubing hydraulics and the Darcy-Weisbach Equation;
explain the concept of friction losses in well tubing and understand the factors that control frictional losses during production and injection;
identify the equations that can be used to estimate the pressure drop in single-phase liquid and gas flow;
perform tubing hydraulics calculations for single-phase liquid and gas flow;
describe the differences between a Pressure Traverse Calculation and a Tubing Performance Calculation for single-phase and multi-phase flow;
list and describe the static and dynamic data considered in tubing hydraulics calculations;
describe the concept of a flow pattern map and how these maps are incorporated into multi-phase tubing hydraulics calculations; and
list the different multi-phase flow correlations used in the oil and gas industry and their applications.

Lesson 6 Checklist

Checklist
To Read	Read the Lesson 6 online material	Click the Introduction link below to continue reading the Lesson 6 material
To Do	Lesson 6 Quiz	Take the Lesson 6 Quiz in Canvas

Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates.

Questions?

If you have questions, please feel free to post them to the Course Q&A Discussion Board in Canvas. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help a classmate.