Lara Zsohar, Baker Hughes
Optimizing Interventions to Maximize ESP Performance
Baker Hughes partnered with AccessESP, an innovator of retrievable ESP technologies, to develop the industry’s first fully rigless alternative to traditional ESP installations. Now wholly owned and operated by Baker Hughes, the AccessESP retrievable ESP system significantly cuts workover costs and carbon emissions while enhancing well production and reservoir recovery.
The rigless ESP system incorporates several AccessESP technologies, each with years of failure-free field performance:
- A permanent completion assembly installs with the production tubing to offer life-of-well flexibility for well cleanup and optimized drawdown.
- A retrievable assembly installs through tubing with industry-standard, light-duty intervention equipment. Eliminating heavy interventions with a rig adds millions of dollars of value over a well’s producing life—with lower carbon emissions and fewer personnel in the field.
- A permanent magnetic motor (PMM) delivers up to 1,200 horsepower (hp) in a light, single-stage body design that boosts well production while minimizing logistics, costs, and emissions. Conventional motors must be stacked in dual or triple configurations to achieve the same power density, making them longer, heavier, and more likely to fail.
Baker Hughes's robust and reliable pumps, seals, and power cables round out the ESP system. Power cables arrive at the well site ready to install, without field splicing, for faster deployment. The cables connect seamlessly to the ESP system’s wet-mate cable connector, which delivers fullbore access, high debris tolerance, and inline and annular flow options for increased reliability and service life.
With a one-time investment, the fully integrated ESP system makes interventions more efficient and economical over the life of the well. While conventional ESP installs might require weeks or months to secure and deploy a workover rig, this new system is installed in a matter of days to bring wells into profitable production sooner. And because interventions can be performed on a live well, the operator gains valuable production uptime.
Proven performance in applications the world over
The rigless ESP system is quickly proving to be profitable and reliable for several remote well applications. Operators are using the system to convert their gas-lifted wells to ESPs for immediate productivity gains and optimized production as reservoir conditions change.
The rigless ESP system is also critical to the JumpStart well cleanout service, a 2021 World Oil Award finalist for Best Completion Technology. The service deploys the ESP system via slickline to remove heavyweight kill fluids from a well in half the time of a coiled tubing-deployed nitrogen lift operation. In field applications from Alaska to Angola to Saudi Arabia, AccessESP-enabled well cleanouts are saving operators from $1 million in offshore deviated and horizontal wells to $3 million in multilateral wells.
In another industry first, the retrievable ESP system helped an Alaskan operator deliver a frac job through an ESP completion. The frac operation successfully stimulated 22 stages and pumped more than 4.5 million pounds of proppant, without damaging the ESP’s permanent completion assembly. Immediately following the frac job, field crews installed the retrievable assembly, PMM, and pump using the same rig. The faster, streamlined completion schedule helped bring the well into production one week earlier and saved $2 million in rig costs.
As new field applications push ESP performance to its technical limits, the AccessESP retrievable ESP system is uniquely qualified to deliver ever-greater oilfield efficiency that other ESP systems cannot match.