A Computer Programme For Gas Parameters Measurement (GPM +PLUS)

Abstract

As the economic importance of Natural gas continues to grow, gas well surveillance equally generates more interest to the petroleum Industry. The static and flowing Bottom-hole pressures must be known in order to predict the productivity or absolute open flow potential of gas wells. Often, these parameters are measured using down hole gauges method of gas well test. In Gas wells, down hole parameters could be estimated using mathematical expressions relating separator conditions and the configuration of the Piping system, instead of measured directly using Gas well Test procedure thus saving lots of dollars. The conventional method of Gas parameter measurement include the iterative method, the Sukkar and Cornell method, Cullender and Smith method. Others are Crawford and Fancher and the Poettman method. All these methods involve very long and cumbersome Iterative/look up procedures. This makes the job of the field men very tedious, especially when the unit system changes. Similarly, data integrity is not guaranteed and could mar the estimation of parameters because data is far from actual. These iterative/look up procedures are always simplified by field men at the expense of accuracy. Engineering problems are now becoming complex that their effective solution requires the systems approach using computers. This research work presents a Microcomputer program for the estimation of Static and Flowing Bottom hole pressure in gas wells, using the iterative method, Sukkar and Cornell method and the Cullender and Simth method. It utilizes a user-friendly window/ dialog based Visual Basic program functional with adjustable unit system. Introduction The increasing importance of gas in world economy has raised a lot of interest in gas well surveillance and parameters estimation. In oil wells, parameters like static pressure, flow bottom hole pressure and flow rate are measured using down hole gauges which is often inconvenient and expensive though more reliable. Often, in gas wells, these down hole parameters are estimated using mathematical expression relating separator conditions and the configuration of the piping system. The percentage error between the measured parameters and the estimate parameters is most times less than 5.2%, Young (1967). This justifies why the parameters used for gas well performance prediction surveillance are often estimated instead of measured directly.