L. W. Osaka, P.Eng.
April 2014
Executive Summary
On January 27, 2011, the Minister of Western Economic Diversification (WD) and the Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada (PTAC) entered into an agreement whereby WD would partially fund a project to review available technologies that claim to effectively and economically dewater natural gas wells. Under this arrangement, PTAC agreed to form a consortium of natural gas producers as well as representatives of the provincial governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan for the purpose of bench testing and field testing shallow natural gas well pumps from Canadian equipment vendors with a view to having a number of these vendors ensure their equipment was market ready, commercially available, and advertised to the upstream natural gas industry in general.
The consortium established a series of performance criteria required of an effective gas dewatering pump. These criteria were presented or sent to a general audience of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) requesting they propose a solution to the gas dewatering issue that would meet these criteria. In the end, 19 proposals from various SMEs were received and reviewed by the consortium. Six of these proposals were determined to be sufficiently advanced enough to warrant further investigation.
The consortium engaged C-FER Technologies (1999) Inc. (C-FER) to determine the operational functionality of the 6 candidates selected. The program was completed on March 31, 2014 and concluded that of the 6 pumps bench tested by CFER, the 2 that were selected for full scale testing by C-FER (the jet pump and the modified plunger pump) are functionally satisfactory and commercially available.