RU2844005C1 - Method of hydrocarbons production from bore wells and device for implementation thereof - Google Patents

Abstract

FIELD: mining.

SUBSTANCE: set of invention relates to production of hydrocarbons from bore wells and to device to this end. Method includes supply of gaseous working agent under pressure inside the well. As a working agent there used is a part of associated hydrocarbon gases pumped with a compressor under pressure to its closed circulation system. System consists of a pipe string lowered into the wellbore, supplying the working agent to the two-stage reversible-cumulative airlift head working member, configured to form by means of two pairs of strong equal-sized thin-walled truncated funnels, alternatively inserted one into another with an annular slot gap with thickness of not more than 8 mm. Tandem of two ascending focused cumulative jets, alternately capturing all the material located under the head working element of the airlift, vortex cyclone is formed in intermediate chamber between airlift upper and lower stages. Said cyclone is separated by centrifugal forces into different-density fractions to concentrate light fractions on barrel-shape filter shaft. Spindle consists of several layers of wavy coils of thin stainless steel wire wrapped around perforated pipe or a bundle of rods with a helical tip, and throws heavy fractions to the periphery to through radially located holes in the wall of the central part of the housing of the head body of the airlift. First airlift stage mouth, protected from below by a transverse mesh filter that prevents the entry of abrasive loose and coarse-grained materials, is located in the wellbore, isolated from contact with the atmosphere, above the oil and underground waters contact boundary fixed therein in compliance with the condition that the continuous casing string shoe is placed and sealed from the outside in the oil reservoir roof. From the product delivered via the annular space of the well to its mouth, first, the required amount of gas is taken for recovery and maintaining the normal circulation cycle with a compressor, which replenishes the spent energy resources, and the rest, as the end result of production, is directed to consumers or for warehousing.

EFFECT: improving efficiency of hydrocarbons production from bore wells.

2 cl, 1 dwg

Description

The group of inventions relates to the field of the oil and gas industry and can be used for the extraction of hydrocarbons from boreholes with different geological and technical conditions of their operating modes, primarily at depleted and/or unprofitable oil fields.

There are a great many known means, devices and methods for extracting natural minerals from the earth's interior for the purpose of their subsequent use in the national economy as energy sources and/or raw materials for the petrochemical industry, among which is, as an alternative, this innovative technical solution, undoubtedly related in terms of the level of novelty of the entire set of its essential distinctive features and the presence of an obvious inventive concept in them to the category of progressive closing technologies, very far from their known and widely used in practice analogues and prototypes. As an example testifying to the reliability of the above, we can mention the most recent, as of the filing date of this application, "Method of Well Oil Production" under Russian Patent No. 2812819, SPK F04F 1/00, E21B 43/00 dated 08/07/2023, which uses a gas lift, a column of pump-compressor pipes and a little-known to science "liquid piston", as well as "Method of Operating a Flooded Gas or Gas Condensate Well" under Russian Patent No. 2708430, SPK E21B 43/00 dated 12/24/2018, which uses, in addition to the standard casing pipe string, two more as many lift pipe strings, a cascade of several dispersants in the form of rings with a conical surface and a separator operating on the earth's surface. Also known are the "Method for lifting heterogeneous multiphase products from a well and a device for implementing it" under Russian patent No. 2683463, IPC E21B 43/00, F04F 5/54, F04D 15/00 dated 06/28/2018, the implementation of which involves jet devices, gas separators, mixing chambers, bypass pipelines and pump and compressor pipes, and the inconspicuously modest "Airlift" under Russian patent No. 2746516, IPC F04F 1/18, E21B 43/00 dated 05/14/2020, in which the amazing advantages of the reversible-cumulative effect and reliable facts that the speed of sound in a gas-water mixture is approximately equal to 10 m / sec are "very deeply hidden" (see works and patents for inventions of Doctor of Technical Sciences Fisenko V.V.). By artificially combining these two inventions into one, putting the "Method...", for example, as the first stage under the "Airlift" or vice versa and separating them from each other by an intermediate chamber, you can get something similar to a prototype with all its advantages and disadvantages, to describe and critically analyze the entire spectrum of which without conducting special experimental work and many years of research is simply unrealistic, knowing in advance that this will be just a pathetic parody of the declared technical solution, which really opens up broad horizons and operational space for searching and finding the right options for designing optimal and highly efficient modes of exploitation of explored reserves of oil and gas fields.

The purpose of this group of inventions is to radically reduce the cost of expenses and costs for extracting hydrocarbons from the earth's interior using a very small set of means, simultaneously with their desired modification into semi-finished and/or final products that are in actual consumer demand.

The method of hydrocarbon production consists of feeding a compressed gaseous working agent, preferably consisting of light fractions of associated gas, through a column of standard pipes used in water supply systems or through classic pump and compressor pipes (PCP) from a compressor into a two-stage reversible-cumulative head working element of an airlift (DRKGROE) lowered to a depth of the lower boundary of oil-water contact, which first swallows in portions and captures for lifting all the contents located in the borehole under the protection of the casing string of pipes with a shoe in the roof of the oil deposit, and then, under the action of a tandem of two, reversely turned mirror-upward sharply focused cumulative jets of the working agent, continuously and simultaneously working with a powerful pusher and the most reliable check valve, completely excluding the return of the material taken inside, lifts a two-phase mixture of hydrocarbons in the form of an emulsion and/or disheveled gas-saturated foam from high-molecular polymer compounds of hydrogen atoms with carbon atoms torn to shreds to the wellhead, where the delivery of the results of the work of the DRKGROE to their intended purposes is completed, but first the working agent is removed from the extracted material, which, after replenishing losses and expended energy resources, is returned by the compressor to the system of its closed circulation for further multiple use, and the rest is sent to consumers or to warehouse storage.

The device for implementing the described method of hydrocarbon extraction consists of ground equipment, including control and measuring devices (pressure sensors and flow meters), a network of pipelines with shut-off and distribution valves, a compressor and/or a source of replenishment of the working agent energy, and underground equipment, which is in a static, rigidly fixed state, completely eliminating the need for any rotation or up-and-down displacement and consisting of only one column of ordinary steel water pipes or tubing with a DRCGROE at its lower end in the presence of a monolithic watertight casing string of pipes with a shoe in the roof of the oil deposit.

Fig. 1 shows a schematic cross-sectional view without observing proportions, without specifying and detailing the features of the locations of through holes and channel axes, without indicating the locations of ground control and monitoring elements, of a two-stage reversible-cumulative head working element of an airlift.

The method of extracting hydrocarbons from boreholes, which guarantees the successful achievement of the goals of its implementation during industrial use, begins with the sequential execution of a whole series of technical operations:

1. Based on the materials of the inspection of the technical condition of a completed borehole or one taken out of operation for various reasons, the installation location of the DRCGROE is determined based on the depths of the location of the contacts of atmospheric air with oil and oil with water, after which the installation and piping with distribution and shut-off valves of all equipment mounted on the surface and inside the borehole is organized (see Fig. 1), and the optimal and/or maximum permissible operating mode is selected, excluding the ingress of groundwater into the borehole and entirely dependent on the capacity and performance of the compressor, as well as on the geometric characteristics of the structural elements of the DRCGROE.

2. After checking the operability and serviceability of all elements of the closed circulation system, the compressor feeds ordinary atmospheric air into the central column of pipes as a working agent, if there is no associated gas storage facility nearby, which is pumped into the DRCGROE and then distributed through its internal channels laid in the body, to the places of its target use to form a tandem of two ascending focused cumulative jets, breaking in the epicenters of their foci at supersonic speed the intermolecular bonds of hydrogen and carbon atoms that have been established over millions of years in the process of their passage through each stage of the DRCGROE and raising the results of their work to the wellhead.

3. Considering that the wellbore below the casing shoe is never sterilely clean and therefore, in addition to the extracted useful product, always contains various impurities in the form of sand, grit and small crushed stone, it is strongly recommended to install a transverse mesh filter (32) with a container (24) at the lower end of the DRCGROE for collecting rock material if its discharge to the bottom of the well under the influence of gravity is extremely undesirable.

4. In addition, taking into account that the initial hydrocarbon fluid is not always uniform in viscosity and consistency and varies over a wide range, in the wall of the DRCGROE housing between its two stages at the level of the upper bell of the first stage, a radially radiant gallery of through holes is placed around the perimeter for removing heavy high-molecular aromatic fractions of oil for discharge that were unable to squeeze through the pore space of the tubular barrel-shaped spindle with a helical tip, creating a powerful vortex centrifugal cyclone that functions in the separator mode, throwing heavy hydrocarbon fractions raised from the bottomhole to the periphery to the open through holes in the housing. This procedure can be automatically repeated cyclically many times until the paraffins, fuel oil or bitumen, methodically being worn away and deformed, finally turn into a finely dispersed colloidal suspension, emulsion or gel.

5. Then all the liquid and gases that have passed the first stage, through the efforts of the second stage of the DRKGROE, accompanied by the available materials that have successfully passed the filtration resistance of the spindle, are sent up to the wellhead, where the working agent is first selected from them to replenish the reserve of expended energy, and then the remaining obtained results of production are sent through the branch channel (33) to consumers in their personal storage tanks.

The innovative device for implementing the declared method of extracting hydrocarbons from boreholes has many variants, depending on the actual formation pressures and other features of the geological, technical and hydrodynamic characteristics of the fields being exploited, therefore only the main variant is described below (see Fig. 1).

The DRKGROE, which is the most important means of implementing the successful achievement of the goals of this method of hydrocarbon production, consists of a cylindrical body (1), the walls of which are penetrated by two groups of longitudinal axial channels (2 and 3) with L-shaped outlets into the cavities (4 and 5) of each of its stages. The cavity of the body (1) of the DRKGROE is conditionally divided into three operating sections (6, 7 and 8), in which two pairs of strong thin-walled equal-sized truncated funnels (9, 10 and 11, 12) are placed, nested one inside the other with regulated annular slit gaps (13 and 14) with a thickness within, for example, from 2 to 8 mm and pairwise removed at a distance approximately equal to 5-8 diameters of the body (1) with the formation of an intermediate chamber (15). The wide bells of the nested funnels (9 and 11) are firmly and hermetically secured to the inner wall of the housing (1), and the funnels (10 and 12) located above them are hermetically joined with their narrow necks to the lower ends of the cylindrical pipes (16 and 17), which act as mixing chambers. The upper ends of the pipes (16 and 17) are hermetically joined to the lower ends of the conical diffusers (18 and 19), the wide bell of which is also firmly and hermetically secured to the inner wall of the housing (1). The end of a barrel-shaped spindle (20) made of several layers of thin wire, for example, stainless steel, twisted in wave-like turns onto a pipe (21) perforated with through holes, or a bundle of rods, the lower part of which is made in the style of a helical tip (22) of a spear, which meets head-on all the material that has come to it at supersonic speed from the epicenter of the pipe (16) and, under the influence of the centrifugal forces generated by the tip (22), throws a small part of it to the periphery to the inner wall of the housing (1) and to the through holes (23), through which large-sized fractions of the substance received on the rise, which have not passed through the open porosity of the spindle (20), are dumped downwards and descend to the bottom of the well or into a special container (24), and hydrocarbons that have successfully passed the spindle (20) turbulently mixed with the working agent coming from the annular slit gap (14) between the funnels (11 and 12), and through the through holes (26) in the dome of the DRKGROE (25) rise along the inter-tube space (28) to the wellhead (29), equipped with all the necessary auxiliary technological equipment, fan-shaped distributing the transport flows to the addressees indicated to them (these are not shown in the drawing due to their insignificance). In conclusion of the description of the method and device, it should be especially noted that the body (1) must be made disassemblable, at least into three parts, to provide the possibility of carrying out preventive maintenance, servicing and repair of its intensively worn structural elements.

The algorithm of the method and the device for its implementation is as follows: the working agent, compressed by the power of the compressor (30) to the required state of its elastic energy and flow rate, is pumped through a column of pipes (31) into the housing (1) of the DRKGROE to perform a whole bunch of operations in the wellbore, vectorially directed upwards, ensuring the capture of the initial material, its complete or partial disintegration in the epicenters of two focused supersonic cumulative flows, in tandem tearing to shreds the molecular bonds of hydrogen and carbon atoms to the state of foam, gel and/or emulsion, which, under high pressure of the ascending stream, is pushed out through the intertube space (28) upwards to the wellhead (29) for its intended use after exiting the channel (33).

In the upper working zone of the well, located above the DRKGROE between its mouth (29) and the dome (25) of the DRKGROE, in the process of low-speed, close to laminar mode, transportation of a turbulent mixture of hydrocarbons through the inter-tube space (28), which acts as a receiver-sedimentation tank, a sluggish, but genetically natural, partial self-restoration of broken polymer chains occurs, starting with the resuscitation of the strongest intermolecular bonds, which makes it possible to model the structure and properties of the desired final product in a wide range from methane to gasoline and diesel oil, which is the subject of the author's know-how and goes far beyond the scope of the described method and device. It can only be added to what has been written that by stopping the extraction of hydrocarbons lifted from the well for a specific period of time without stopping the compressor, which provides a circular closed circulation of the working agent and creates a tandem of two powerful ascending focused cumulative flows, it is possible to modify, with the participation of catalysts and special additives, almost any initial liquid oil to methane and/or propane or any other state that meets the interests of consumers and safe delivery to petrochemical plants, because the presence of high pressure in the working agent and the extracted hydrocarbon products in the wellbore tightly blocks the flow of groundwater from under the oil deposit, if the casing string of pipes does not have fistulas and holes.

Claims (2)

1. A method for producing hydrocarbons from boreholes based on feeding a gaseous working agent into the borehole under pressure to create a lifting force that delivers to the daylight surface all liquid fractions of oil and associated gas entering its borehole from a productive deposit during their pumping out, characterized in that a portion of the associated hydrocarbon gases pumped by a compressor under pressure into its closed circulation system is used as the working agent, consisting of a pipe string lowered into the borehole that feeds the working agent into a two-stage reversible-cumulative head working element of an airlift, designed with the possibility of forming, by means of two pairs of strong equal-sized thin-walled truncated funnels alternately nested inside each other with an annular slit gap no more than 8 mm thick, a tandem of two ascending focused cumulative jets that alternately capture all the material located under the head working element airlift, and forming in the intermediate chamber between the upper and lower stages of the airlift a vortex cyclone, which by means of centrifugal forces separates the raised gas-saturated liquid substance into fractions of different density, concentrates the light fractions on the axis of the filter in the form of a barrel-shaped spindle consisting of several layers of wave-shaped turns of thin stainless wire wrapped around a perforated pipe or a bundle of rods with a helical tip, and throws the heavy fractions to the periphery to through radially located holes in the wall of the central part of the body of the head body of the airlift, wherein the mouth of the first stage of the airlift, protected at the bottom by a transverse mesh filter that prevents the entry of abrasive loose and coarse-grained materials, is located in the wellbore, isolated from contact with the atmosphere, above the boundary of contact of oil and groundwater fixed in it, observing the condition that the shoe of the solid casing string of pipes is placed and outside sealed in the roof of the oil reservoir, and from the product delivered through the inter-tube space of the well to its mouth, the required amount of gas is first taken to renew and maintain the circulation cycle at a normal level by a compressor, replenishing the spent energy resources, and everything else, as the final result of extraction, is sent to consumers or to warehouse storage. 2. A device for implementing a method for extracting hydrocarbons from boreholes, consisting of ground-based compressor equipment, storage tanks and pipeline networks with valves and gate valves distributing the transported products according to their intended purpose, and an underground device consisting of a pipe column lowered into a well, feeding the main working element of the airlift, characterized in that in the wall of the housing of the main working element of the airlift there are two groups of longitudinally axial channels with L-shaped outlets into the ends of slit annular gaps with a thickness of 2 to 8 mm, formed in each pair of equal-sized thin-walled truncated funnels by means of their coaxial nesting one into the other, spaced at a distance approximately equal to 5-8 diameters of the housing with the formation of an intermediate chamber dividing the main working element of the airlift into two successive stages of feeding the working agent, wherein the wide sockets of the nested funnels of each stage are hermetically secured to the inner wall of the housing, into the mouth A filter with a helical tip, made in the form of a spindle from wave-wound turns of wire, is inserted into the upper funnel of the second stage; a series of through holes for the exit and discharge of heavy fractions is made in the wall of the housing in the section of the intermediate chamber; a diffuser neck is hermetically secured at the end of the upper funnel of the first stage, which with its wide socket is hermetically connected to the inner wall of the housing in the lower part of the intermediate chamber, and the dome of the main working element of the airlift is equipped with a network of through holes for the free exit to the top of all products received for lifting.