Gas Lift Gurus
Frequently Asked Questions
Our GURU experts put together a list of frequently asked questions about both gas lift analysis and our use of artificial intelligence to help customers better understand how easy it is to incorporate our pGuru monitoring and surveillance service into present day gas lifted well operations.
FAQs From Our Gas Lift Experts
Our GURU experts put together a list of FAQs to help customers better understand how easy it is to incorporate our pGuru monitoring and surveillance service into present day gas lifted well operations.
Click on the + icons to expand each section.
What do you mean, Every Well. Every Day.℠?
In addition to fixing wells with obvious problems, most well-intentioned gas lift engineers run optimization campaigns every few months and may only revisit a particular well’s performance in detail once a year. Gas Lift Gurus will take in all new data continuously, and run every gas lift well through a suite of AI-powered analytics, provide detailed recommendations that you can implement, and prioritize all the opportunities for you every day based on preliminary economics.
You will be able to choose the opportunities you would like to implement whenever you like. We also create a summary report for you with data on the current opportunities, and on completed work as soon as we get the results.
The cost of Gas Lift Gurus, the thoroughness of surveillance, and the expert advice given seems too low. What are we missing?
We are in a new era of productivity where human efforts can be massively leveraged by new technology. It is only possible for us to offer this sort of service because we have efficient, standardized processes created by human experts that are used by advanced AI systems.
The effort to create complex AI systems is only now practical, given the advances in AI knowledge. The speed of these systems has increased exponentially (Moore’s Law).
It is unfair to compare the abilities of company engineers armed only with design and modeling software with experts armed with a system they constantly improve that never sleeps, never forgets, never has a bad day, and can perform in minutes every analysis that a company engineer would like to create if they had a day or two of spare time.
Company engineers have many other responsibilities, while Gas Lift Gurus only have one job of improving your gas lift well production.
We already have engineers who do our gas lift optimization. Why would we use Gas Lift Gurus?
The ideal organization for optimizing gas lift wells is to have a team of experts that focus full-time on gas lift within asset teams. We know of only a few of these teams in the world. They have significant turnover because often those experienced engineers are more valuable elsewhere in the company, and because of the somewhat tedious nature of continuous surveillance.
Training new gas lift engineers into experts is a long process, and the supply of engineers in the oil and gas business seems to be shrinking in many places.
Gas Lift Gurus is not intended to reduce the number of engineers currently employed. The review and recommendations that the Gurus supply need to be received by engineers to manage the recommended implementations.
By freeing up time they would have spent reviewing data and making recommendations, they will be able to work on higher-level efforts that are always needed in gas-lifted fields, for example, improving measurements, enhancing system availability, removing restrictions, planning interventions, interpreting surveys, troubleshooting operations, etc.
Our automated real-time data monitoring system already tells us when values fall outside of known limits. Would Gas Lift Gurus be a replacement for this system?
Gurus will utilize and supplement your real-time system. Our processes will utilize the real-time data plus other data such as well tests and downhole pressure surveys, process them through models, use the models to feed AI agents, use the agents to screen for a large number of known problems, and then use human experts to review the AI analysis and create the final recommendations.
Real-time data is very helpful, although over time, the quantity of resulting data and warnings/alarms coming in every day can overwhelm and numb the engineers that receive it. Gas Lift Gurus will turn your automated data flow into a short, prioritized set of easily understood recommendations.
Our gas lift vendor creates all of our designs. Would Gas Lift Gurus replace this work?
It is well known that gas lift hides its problems and inefficiencies very well. The hard and valuable part of gas lift is finding the opportunities to improve gas lift installations before the opportunities become obvious.
Gas Lift Gurus will monitor your wells every day and produce new designs whenever redesigns would be profitable to your company. We create conservative designs that minimize complexity, and usually, those designs are less expensive to purchase, install, and maintain, and are more likely to work the first time.
We also monitor for changes that can be done at the surface, recommend acquiring additional data, and watch for problems such as tubing leaks or inflow impairment. In short, we don’t mind if you have your vendor review the designs, but Gas Lift Gurus is providing much more, much more often than what gas lift equipment vendors are able to provide.
What gas lift equipment do you sell/recommend?
We do not sell gas lift valves or mandrels. We work with any equipment you have. Our incentive is to maximize your well performance in order to keep you subscribing to our service.
We don’t even have any models of our wells. Our SCADA system is very limited. Will Gas Lift Gurus still be able to help us?
The Gas Lift Gurus system will utilize whatever information you have. We can take in recent well-test data, plus the wellbore data including sizes, depths, and directional data. We will build models of your wells, create recommendations, and we will update our recommendations whenever new data is acquired.
Our wells have certain characteristics that are unique and we have developed unique methods for monitoring and/or designing them. Can Gas Lift Gurus help us?
We think we have seen almost everything, but our systems can probably incorporate your unusual challenges. We can handle anything we can model, and we can tweak our AI to monitor for special cases. We are ready to handle continuous gas lift for oil wells and want to start working on fields with intermittent lift, plunger-assisted lift, and liquid loading of gas wells.
Can our own engineers use your Gas Lift Guru software tools?
What is the worst-case scenario for using Gas Lift Gurus?
The service is a monthly fee that you can cancel at any time if you do not believe you are receiving sufficient value from the opportunities uncovered and the savings in your own engineering staff time.
There is a small upfront cost for creating the dedicated database and models for your wells. In the very “worst” case, after creating the models for your wells and running them through every analysis, we would find that you have some amazing combination of problem-free wells and super-human engineers. In that case, we would be happy to provide you with certification to use for bonuses and bragging rights. But, even in that “worst” case, will your wells stay problem-free?
Can your super-engineers maintain such performance over time? Is this the most valuable use of their superpowers?
guru FAQS
Frequently Asked Questions About Guru’s Use of AI
Our GURU experts put together a list of FAQs about Guru’s use of artificial intelligence we use to help customers better understand how easy it is to securely incorporate our pGuru monitoring and surveillance service into present-day gas-lifted well operations.
Click on the + icons to expand each section.
How is it possible for Gas Lift Gurus to assess every well in a field every day?
Assessing a gas-lifted well is tedious and time-consuming. We have developed an AI-based software application (“pGuru”) that performs these time-consuming tasks, making it possible for our gas lift domain experts – the “Gurus” – to review Every Well. Every Day.℠
Does Guru’s AI-based software use AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E or other generative AI / large language model systems?
No. The term ‘artificial intelligence’ refers to many different technologies that have been developed over the last seven decades. pGuru incorporates several different AI technologies, each selected to address particular parts of the gas lift analysis problem.
What do you mean by AI technologies?
ChatGPT was released in 2022 and has disrupted many things, making AI controversial. However, AI started in the 1950s. It has evolved while bringing us many wonderful abilities in image processing, character and text recognition, speech recognition, natural language understanding, decision support, and planning.
When you use Google Maps or another GPS technology, calculating the best route uses artificial intelligence. If you use voice recognition to input your destination, that is using AI. The search engine you have been using for 25 years is AI.
Artificial Intelligence is the ability to perform a task that usually requires a human. There are many methods for building AI into systems.
pGuru has been heavily influenced by work on a decision-support system developed in the 1990s for assisting pilots. Read more about the Pilot’s Associate below.
pGuru is described as an intelligent system. Where does pGuru get its gas lift knowledge?
The models and techniques historically created and used by gas lift experts that are part of pGuru were originally incorporated in AppSmith’s WinGLUE software. We built pGuru by automating these models and techniques, then used signal analysis algorithms, rules-of-thumb, pattern recognition techniques, and decision-making strategies used by experts to replicate the output of gas lift experts.
Does pGuru’s knowledge base come from the internet?
No. Our domain experts provided the knowledge incorporated in pGuru.
Does pGuru learn on its own?
No. By design, pGuru does NOT learn on its own. Systems that learn independently may – or may not – learn the right things. The knowledge in pGuru is curated, meaning it has been selected, organized, and implemented with guidance from gas lift experts.
pGuru’s capabilities can be ‘tuned’ to field conditions and will improve through the standard software upgrade process, guided by our experts.
Does pGuru replace gas lift domain experts?
No. pGuru does not replace people. Think of pGuru as one part of a human-in-the-loop system. Every day, for every well in a field, pGuru performs a set of tedious and time-consuming tasks for the expert.
pGuru is intelligent decision-support software. Note that pGuru identifies and diagnoses problems and makes recommendations, but it never makes a decision and never takes action on its own. Our Gurus – and our client’s engineers — review the results for each well and can choose to either accept, modify, or reject the recommendations made by pGuru.
By utilizing Gas Lift Gurus’ help with the surveillance, analysis, and remedial recommendations, our client’s engineers will finally have time to focus on planning and implementing optimization work on the gas lift wells, as well as investigating things such as valve reliability, well-unloading practices, compressor reliability, metering inaccuracy, well testing strategies, etc. There is never a shortage of challenges in artificially lifted fields.
If pGuru is such good software, why are Gurus needed?
- Gas lift well assessment requires some human judgment because of missing and poor information, or information that is difficult to incorporate, which can vary by field. For example, water cut may be important but uncertain in one field while another field has to prioritize opportunities based on rig location or wireline risk.
- Software is never perfect. Automating the final 20% of a process may require more than 80% of the effort. Rather than attempting to create the perfect software, we have humans in the loop. The software can still do all the tedious, time-consuming work.
- Humans are better than software at recognizing and accounting for subtleties, particularly in interpreting information from other humans.
- Our gas lift Gurus provide the ultimate quality control of results we provide to our clients.
What was the Pilot’s Associate?
Imagine that you were a fighter pilot in the mid-1980s. By that point in time, dogfighting (i.e., aerial battles fought at close range) was being supplanted by new, long-range tactics enabled by advanced sensor and weapons systems.
Though extraordinarily powerful, these new systems also increased cockpit workloads, making it difficult for pilots to manage complex sensors and weapons while flying, fighting, and returning home safely.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, DARPA and the US Air Force funded the Pilot’s Associate (“PA”) program to explore the use of artificial intelligence in fighter aircraft.[1] Functionally, the PA system was intended to be a digital back-seater to reduce pilot workloads and provide decision-aiding for complex missions.
[1] The PA Program was one of three applications funded through DARPA’s Strategic Computing Program. See https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/trcircular/310/310-004.pdf
The Pilot’s Associate is relevant because…?
The term associate refers to a human-machine system that grants full control to the human. The core guiding principle for the PA was this phrase: the Pilot is in charge.
The PA software’s role was to perform tedious tasks, present information as clearly as possible to users, and make recommendations to the pilot.
This same principle applies to pGuru:
The human Guru is in charge.
In its time, the PA was described as a network of cooperating expert systems. The expert systems included modules for aircraft status monitoring, external threat assessment, route planning, tactics planning, and cockpit display management.
The PA’s developers did not employ any single AI technology but rather many technologies, each adapted to the particular problems being addressed in a module. Similarly, pGuru employs several different AI technologies, each selected to address specific problems.
Cockpit display management was an integral part of the PA system. Pilots push buttons on conventional cockpit displays to access the necessary information – a distracting task at best.
The PA display system was adaptive, meaning that the system was designed to display information relevant to a tactical need. The information most relevant for defensive maneuvers differs from the information most relevant to beyond-visual-range attacks.
pGuru incorporates two key principles rooted in the PA:
1. pGuru presents its results in ways consistent with a gas lift engineer’s mental model of problem-solving. The numerous graphs, tables, and charts in pGuru displays are what an engineer would want to see.
2. pGuru explains the reasoning behind its analysis and recommendations. The system uses text generation to provide insights into “what the system was thinking” during its analysis of a well.
