Nodding Donkeys Fail as Long Shale Wells Make Pumping Oil Harder

Nodding Donkeys Fail as Long Shale Wells Make Pumping Oil Harder
Some of oil reserves may get stuck underground if the industry's pumps keep failing.

(Bloomberg) -- Imagine trying to slurp a thick chocolate shake through a J-shaped straw four miles long. That’s the kind of cheek-puckering test the American shale industry must overcome to prolong a record boom in oil output.

For almost a decade, drillers have been using new techniques to tap vast petroleum reserves scattered within deep, porous rock layers in places like west Texas, Pennsylvania and southern Canada. By digging extra-long wells that went down and then sideways at different angles, engineers were able to capture a lot more crude than from a vertical hole.

While those new methods unlocked a torrent of new supply and turned the U.S. into the world’s largest producer, the increased difficulty of sucking fluid from so far underground is overwhelming pump systems that have changed little in decades. The mismatch is causing more well failures, rising costs at a time of low prices, and a scramble by companies like Exxon Mobil Corp. for alternative ways of maintaining flows.

“Every horizontal well -- no matter where you are -- has this problem,” said Jeff Saponja, chief executive officer of Heal Systems, a Calgary-based engineering company that is working with Schlumberger Ltd., the world’s biggest oil-service provider, on developing products that make pumps and pipes work more efficiently.

Extracting oil is usually easy at first as liquid gushes to the surface. But that quickly fades as the pressure eases, so producers rely on pumps that slowly extract the bulk of the reserves over years or even decades. The most common variety is a pumpjack -- more commonly known as a nodding donkey -- a technology that’s been in use for more than a century.

The nodding donkey has a steel hammerhead hovering over the well, bobbing up and down to create suction in the hole, aided by a rotating counterweight. The method is effective on vertical wells that go straight down, but is less so when used on horizontal ones. It’s not uncommon for a shale well to go down a mile, then use another 800 feet of pipe to bend from vertical to horizontal before continuing sideways for a another mile or more.

Shorter Lifespans

Pumpjacks on vertical wells can last five or six years without any problems, said Jesse Filipi, who until last year worked as an engineer for Marathon Oil Corp. and was responsible for about 700 producing wells in the Eagle Ford Shale deposit in south Texas. The same pumps might not last two years on the newer horizontal wells, he said.

“You’re trying to understand what’s going on, and then you start to realize, it’s just not quite working the way everyone tells you it should be working,” said Filipi, who now works for Ambyint Inc., an oil-technology company in Calgary that focuses on ways to improve pumping systems that the industry refers to as artificial lift.

To be sure, there are only about 50,000 horizontal wells in the U.S. and Canada that use nodding donkeys, compared with a total of 1.2 million production wells in the region, according data compiled by Ambyint.

But horizontal wells have been central to a resurgence of North American output. The shale boom helped to double U.S. production since 2005. It’s now the highest ever, exceeding even Saudi Arabia, according to BP Plc data. Texas, home to the biggest shale deposits, saw output triple.

Yet some of those oil reserves may get stuck underground if the industry’s pumps keep failing, which boosts costs for shale deposits that were initially cheap to exploit and often remained profitable even when crude fell to $50.

It costs about $250,000 to install a nodding donkey, along with all the startup gear, and as much as $100,000 to repair or replace it, according to Ambyint.

“If you’re failing your pump all the time, you’re not getting low lifting costs,” said Saponja, who had first-hand experience when he worked at a small exploration and production company in the Bakken shale region of North Dakota. Over a two-year period, Saponja said he replaced its pump more than half a dozen times.

“There is no one favorable solution for the problem,” said Cem Sarica, director of a research group at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma that is trying to develop alternatives with funding from companies including Exxon and BP.


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Thomas Bath  |  December 12, 2017
Learned something new. I have been in the oil business for 35 years and have never heard "nodding donkey" before. No one at the office has either.. Thanks for teaching us something new. Tom


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