The Stroke Reduction Long Game to Failure Rate Reduction

By David Zahn, COO at Ambyint

Ambyint’s production optimization solution for rod lift artificial systems has reduced strokes on thousands of E&P wells for years – typically lowering the number of strokes across a field of wells by an average of 24 percent. E&P customers understand that taking energy out of a system will lead to lower failure rates. Clearly, fewer compressive strokes will reduce failures, but there are often question marks on the potential for reduction, which only becomes apparent over time.

Proving failure rate reduction faces certain challenges in terms of gathering and analyzing necessary data as well as ensuring reductions are attributable to optimization interventions. For instance, not all operations teams sufficiently track detailed failure data and reason codes. Some even lack a comprehensive failure program causing critical operational data to go unrecorded. In these cases, heuristics and tribal knowledge drive interventions at the well site with little traceability on the effectiveness of actions taken.

Based on its years of experience in this space, Ambyint has a data-driven methodology for comparing well lifespans before and after applying Ambyint. As every well is unique in terms of equipment, design, and more, comparing before and after effects of Ambyint stroke reduction on the same well gives the only reliable, quantifiable result for impacts to mean time between failures.

In fact, Ambyint recently performed this analysis for a number of customers as it closed out 2020 including one with wells in the Bakken formation and another with wells in the Eagle Ford shale play. Both E&P companies saw an average of 24 percent improvement in run times. Across our customers, our average is closer to 35 percent, which typically comes with more time as the benefits of Ambyint maintaining well optimization states across the field mount. Ambyint is eager to share its knowledge of optimization strategies that can lower failure rates and how to measure those results over time. Interested in learning more?