Proven tips help avoid costly negative production optimization.

This column is meant to be about production optimization. And it will be, in a backhanded sort of way. Say production optimization and the average oily type will begin to think of any number of technical methods to keep production at the highest possible level. That is only normal. But I suggest production optimization might also include - should also include, actually - another technique: avoiding those things that negatively impact production, or negative production optimization. Sometimes, the best way to optimize production is to not damage it. To illustrate the point, below are a few
real-life examples of negative production optimization, along with suggested techniques to remedy the situations.
The first technique is called "watch your hands." Hands is used here in its traditional sense - field employees - rather than denoting those ham-like objects hanging from your wrists. I recall passing, on a fine summer day, a group of roustabouts in a West Texas oil field. They were standing in a circle a bit off the road, obviously entertaining themselves while the gang pusher was occupied elsewhere. Being the curious type, I stopped my truck and walked over to see what was going on. The group was standing around an abandoned well capped with a large swaged nipple and a valve. It might have had pressure once, but that would have been a good deal before our time. As I joined the circle, one of the hands said, "Hey, Bill, listen to this," whereupon he dropped a good-sized bolt through the open valve on the swaged nipple. The resulting "ping, ping, pong, ping, pong" as the bolt bounced down the production casing was, indeed, an entertaining sound. I had no idea how long they had been at the game, or who had taught it to them, but I was sure it was not the first bolt down the hole. Giving it little thought, I bade them farewell and went about my business.
A few months later, I walked into the field office to find the drilling foreman in some distress. He was in charge of deepening selected abandoned wells to the Dean/Wolfcamp formation. He was having a devil of a time getting the latest deepening effort out of the bottom of the original production casing. He could not figure it out; it would not drill and barely milled. By now you will have put two and two together. It almost broke my heart to tell him that, in all likelihood, he was trying to mill up a 20-year accumulation of casehardened bolts. So, watch your hands.
A similar technique is called "watch your young engineers." Here is another real-life case study. It happened in the same field, about a year later. The field contained about 570 wells. A few were deepened and flowing nicely; a few were water disposal wells; more than 200 were abandoned; and the rest were on beam pumps with an average production of less than 3 b/d and enough water to float a small armada. We had a freshly graduated and very eager young engineer in the district office. His charge was production enhancement, a difficult job given the nature of the field. As part of his efforts, he decided that one of our better wells - a 7-barreler - could be improved by simply increasing the strokes per minute on the beam-pumping unit. A heated battle ensued with the field personnel, who were sure the exercise would fail; the unit was nearly 30 years old and maintenance had been spotty. But the young engineer insisted on adding four strokes per minute. The next morning we found the sampson post, gearbox, counterweights and arms where they usually were. The walking beam, horse's head, pittman arms and other gear were scattered about in some disarray. We had, I reckoned, taken production from 7 b/d to zero in less than 20 minutes. So, watch your young engineers.
And the "a little pressure isn't dangerous" negative production optimization technique cannot escape discussion. I plead guilty to this one. It happened in another West Texas field characterized by the same stripper wells. In the midst of troubleshooting some balky producers, I stopped by a well that, unlike most others, occasionally built up casing pressure. In casing as old and corrupt as this was, it was not surprising. The preferred method of dealing with the pressure was to partially open the casing valve and bleed the pressure into the heater-treater at the tank battery. There it would slowly work through the system. We, of course, relied on the pressure-relief valve to take care of any excess pressure. We did not often see much pressure; 30 psi, as memory serves me, was about tops in this well's casing. And we did not consider this especially dangerous. We were wrong. The pressure-relief valve was stuck shut on this particular day. I doubt it had been function-tested in several years. At those pressure figures, we reasoned, why bother? Wrong again. I can testify that 30-psi overpressure in a 30-year-old heater-treater can result in a spectacular launch. I did not see it happen, but the next day, we found the treater about 20 ft (6 m) away, on the other side of an undamaged, 5-ft (2-m) fence. It clearly was not dragged to that point. Beware the "a little pressure isn't dangerous" theory.
To wrap up our discussion of negative production optimization, let's turn to the "safety rules have a purpose" dictum. This topic puts me in mind of Strawberry, a field hand in another West Texas field. I think of Strawberry because he was safety committee chairman and often the topic of our safety meetings. One instance that comes to mind involves Strawberry, a gin-pole truck, a pole-type pipe trailer and me. Strawberry and I (a summer roustabout) were returning the empty trailer to the yard, with Strawberry at the wheel. As safety chairman, Strawberry was interestingly naïve about safety regulations. He had neglected to secure the safety chain to the trailer.
Now Strawberry had, as anyone should, an innate wariness about poisonous snakes. Approaching the yard at an immoderate speed, we encountered fellow employees bound in the opposite direction. A flick of the other driver's wrist wrapped a freshly killed rattlesnake around our truck's windshield. Strawberry panicked, swerved and recovered. The pipe trailer did not. It went bounding down the side of the road, eventually taking out several flowlines, two metering loops and eight or so power poles. Of course, the use of safety chains might not have prevented the damage, but bets are it would have. The next safety meeting was particularly memorable.
These stories have a value other than "old war stories" clatter. In each case, and in dozens more from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Sea, production was lost due to completely avoidable mistakes. If the avoidance of these mistakes does not qualify as production optimization, I do not know what might.