ipaa ogis new york, page-10

Hi Sharks,

If I may add to what you just said and offer some input based on person experience with pumping equipment.

Most of the pumps are designed primarily to move liquids. In our case oil and water. Hopefully more of the former and less of the latter. Quantities of gas are normal, as are small quantities of solid particulates, ie gains of sand etc.

As the expected liquids compress less than contained gases, the ratio of liquid to gas is important to the performance of the pump. Obviously the solids don't compress at all but as long as they are in small quantities and remain suspended within a liquid that isn't usually important.

If the gas ratio is too high then many pumps will find that with each stroke they are doing more compression than actual movement of the overall volume resulting in a lack of volumetric momentum. For a pump designed to move liquids this is likely to produce very low outputs from the pumping cycle, although the exact outcome will very from pump to pump and with different configurations.

Low overall quantities of liquids can also impact the pump through lack of cooling and lubrication which is likely to result in pump failure eventually, if the pump wasn't designed to handle that. Add extra particulates of solids into the mix and that problem can be much worse. Anybody who has gone to investigate a pump on tanks that have run dry will have seen first hand how hot the pump gets without the liquids passing through it.

My guess based on what the company has previously announced is that they have been trying to counter multiple problems, ie too high a gas content resulting in too much compression and not enough oil content to suspend the sand during the full stroke cycle of the pump thus shreding the pump seals at a rapid rate.

I suspect that they were hoping / expecting that one of several things would happen as they continued the pumping operations:

a) The sands content would reduce as the dislodged particles from the fracking process and plug drilling were sucked out in the early days

b) The oil to gas ratio would increase thus reducing compression, creating more volumetric momentum, and improving the sand suspension within the overall volume and reducing the damage to the pump seals.

As they have now decided to switch pump types this may be because they now believe they are simply going to have to live with the large quantities of gas from this well or it may just be that ther pump people have said there is little else they can do with the existing pump types until one of the above changes. Or then again it could be that management are just as pee'd off with all the pump problems as the rest of us, recognising that we can't just keep doing the same thing expecting a different outcome and decided the bite the bullet and do it differently.

The uphole / downhole changes are also interesting and potentially significant. Uphole pumping is generally less efficient than downhole pumping. Pushing a fluid is generally preferred to pulling it. Pulling it (sucking)creates a vacuum in the well and that vacuum is greatest near the source of the vacuum being created, ie at the pump sitting over the well. A surface pump makes the well want to implode. Think of it like a kid sucking on a straw that get blocked at the base by a bit of ice. The straw just collapases in on itself. This doesn't happen when pushing, ie blowing so a downhole pump in theory can run much higher presures and also should be more efficient, on an apples to apples comparison basis anyway. Different pump types obviously consume different amounts of energy per volume to operate which impact efficiency also.

Downhole pumps are however harder to maintain, repair and generally to see what is happening, although surface pumps don't seem to be that transparent in reguard to these factors anyway, based in SSNs recent experience.

The pump change sounds logical given that they have tried a number of different conventional pumps and configurations. This should work although nothing is certain and as I have never used this type of pump myself my opinion is worth every cent you are paying for it.

It will be very interesting to see what production rate they can establish with this new pump. While it would be a brave or generally foolhardy person who goes predicting huge flow rates from this well, previous maximums aren't necessarily relevant limits either. Its a complete unknown I suspect and while that would normally be considered fun, it seems many have had enough fun for now and just want a number that they can put into their spreadsheet which is fair enough.

I suspect this saga will come to an end soon and while I'm not making any predictions it could be a much better result than we have come to expect.