Gas Lift Gurus

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. And, company engineers have many other responsibilities while Gas Lift Gurus only have one job of improving your gas lift well production.

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 needs 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.

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.

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 of improving 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.

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.

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.

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.

We decided to provide a service rather than selling our software for several reasons, all related to maximizing the potential benefits to our customers. Shaping and polishing our internal software interfaces for multiple markets, training other engineers to use our systems, helping them set up and use the software in efficient ways, managing licenses, incorporating user feedback, etc. – all the overhead of selling and supporting software — would take a lot of time away from improving your field’s production.

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?