Oil Well Tester

One of the most difficult tasks in the business of producing crude oil is measuring the oil production rate from individual wells. One would think it would be an easy task; water is always associated with oil as it coms from the ground - oil and water don't mix - so all you should need to do is produce the fluid into a tank, let the water settle to the bottom, the oil to the top and run them past a flow meter.

As you probably gathered, it never is that simple. First, crude oil and water typically form emulsions. They mix together and are not easily separated and it is common to produce oil that has 30% or more water emulsified in it. Another problem is many oil producing reservoirs around the world actually produce way more water than they do oil. In Kern County oil fields in California, wells commonly produce +95% water, 5% oil so a testing system must be developed that can separate these two components and accurately measure the smaller of the two. Finally, much of the world's oil is very 'heavy' (a term used to describe oil that is more like roof tar than the motor oil you might envision; very thick and gooey and weighs almost the same as water so it doesn't tend to float on top of water very readily and surprisingly tends to mix or emulsify with water easily, totally messing up attempts to measure it).

The attached PowerPoint slide show describes an automated well testing system that overcomes all of these obstacles and yields a lot of accurate and inexpensive well tests.