American Petroleum Institute

Recommended Practices for Operation, Maintenance, Surveillance, and Troubleshooting of Gas-lift Installations - THIRD EDITION
 N RP 11V5

Annotation

Introduction

These recommended practices are offered to assist gas-lift system operators, analysts, technicians, engineers, and others in understanding how to effectively plan, operate, maintain, troubleshoot, and provide surveillance of gas-lift systems and gas-lift wells.

This document may be used in a gas-lift training course or as reference material. It can be obtained in booklet form as an API publication, or on CD ROM or cassette in Adobe PDF format.

These recommended practices discuss continuous gas-lift with injection in the casing/tubing annulus and production up the tubing. Annular flow gas-lift (injection down the tubing and production up the annulus), dual gas-lift (two tubing strings in the same casing), and intermittent gas-lift are mentioned; however, most of the discussion focuses on “conventional” continuous gas-lift. Many of the recommended practices in this document may be pertinent to the other forms of gas-lift, but they should be considered and used with caution. Other recommended practices will address dual gas-lift (API 11V9) and intermittent gas-lift (API 11V10).

This document includes:

— Gas-lift Operating System Components and Potential Problems.

Sections 1 through 11 describe the several components of an operating gas-lift system and discuss a number of problems that may be encountered and must be addressed to operate a gas-lift system effectively and efficiently. These sections are new to this edition of the document. A comprehensive checklist of system components is provided and associated problems are discussed. The list can be used when troubleshooting or de-bottlenecking a gas-lift system.