The Potential of Hydrogen Gas in Gas Lifting Oil Well

Abstract

Hydrogen gas usage is expanding into various sector of our economy due to its physio-chemical properties, as well as political and economic attentions in response to rising energy demand and low carbon requirements. During the net-zero carbon transition period, oil and gas industries will continue to devise new strategies to improve oil production and also meet the low carbon requirements. Firstly, this work presents a brief overview of the production, transportation, compression, storage, deblending and usage of hydrogen gas.  The potential of using hydrogen-natural gas blends for gas lifting oil wells was studied, considering Well-X (that has experienced natural gas lift for years, and a foam-assisted gas lift trial was currently conducted) n the Niger Delta. The gas lifted well was modelled to match the production data from the test conducted on Well-X pre-foam assisted gas lift field trial on the well. Then, further analysis of the well performance was carried out. Oil rate increment between 10 and 22 stb/d was obtained from the well performance simulations for various hydrogen-natural blends, which is insignificant when compared to the reported 280 bbls/d oil rate increment of the foam-assisted gas lift field trial. Furthermore, irrespective of the hydrogen-natural gas blends, gas injection rate has significant influence on the profitability of the production strategy. However, the 30 % hydrogen-natural gas lift case has the least positive NPV values, due to the high electrolytic hydrogen production costs of $1.11 per kg considered.