Experimental evaluation of nozzles to mitigate liquid loading in gas wells

Abstract An optimally designed nozzle can be used as an efficient artificial lift system to deliquify gas wells. The objective of this work is to determine the most optimum nozzle parameters and geometry that would maximize critical pressure ratio while minimizing pressure drop across the nozzle under two-phase flow conditions. Six optimum nozzle geometries, evaluated under single-phase flow conditions in a previous study, are evaluated in this work. Two separate facilities were used to conduct the two-phase (air and water) experiments: a horizontal facility with 1.5 in. inner diameter (ID) PVC pipelines and a 30 ft long lateral pipeline section, and a vertical facility with 1.5 in. ID PVC pipelines and a 30 ft long vertical pipeline section. The horizontal facility was used to study the effect of introducing water into the system as a second phase, and the vertical facility was used to simulate conditions of a gas well with a nozzle installed as an artificial lift system. Horizontal flow experimental results showed that critical pressure ratio decreases for two-phase flow relative to single-phase flow. The distance of the annular churn flow pattern observed downstream the nozzle may be related to the nozzle performance; significantly lower performance was observed for the LJ nozzle in two phase horizontal testing relative to other nozzles – one characteristic this might be attributed to is the peculiarly longer distance of downstream annular churn flow pattern observed for this particular nozzle compared to other nozzles. Based on data analysis, the ASTAR nozzle group showed the most improved performance, similar to results obtained in single-phase horizontal testing. Based on vertical experimental results, the most optimum nozzle geometry to deliquify a loaded gas well was identified as the ASTAR nozzle 2, a parabolic nozzle geometry. A significant temperature drop downstream the nozzle was observed during these experiments. It is important to account for temperature change while designing a nozzle in order to avoid flow assurance problems, such as gas hydrate formation. The trends observed in relative performance between different nozzle geometries (rankings based on critical pressure ratio and pressure drop) for two-phase vertical experiments were similar to those observed for single-phase horizontal experiments. Therefore, single-phase experiments could be sufficient to evaluate relative nozzle geometry performance based on critical pressure ratio, for the conditions used in this study.