Artificial Lift Engineers Leverage Digital Smarts And Rugged New Hardware By Danny Boyd Selecting the right artificial lift system for each stage of a well's life has long been a key element of optimizing its performance and obtaining consistent financial returns. Today, production engineers have an even bigger toolbox thanks to incremental improvements to familiar concepts and powerful new ideas that are extending many artificial lift techniques' operating windows and strengthening their resilience to harsh environments, gas slugs and power disruptions. But no matter how flexible and robust artificial lift systems become, maximizing their economics requires periodic finetuning that once would have required hours of tedious analysis. As remote management of artificial lift systems improves and well operations become more autonomous, it is freeing engineers from routine adjustments so they can focus on solving novel problems. " We have been on the intelligent automation journey for a while, but there remains a lot of untapped potential, " reflects Derek Meier, product line manager for production optimization software at ChampionX. " There is a lot more we are able to do and will be able to do in the near future around autonomous control and intelligent automation to help operations staff make better decisions and squeeze as much as possible from existing wells. " JUNE 2024 43