About DRC

DRC and the SPIDR Surface Well Testing System began as an idea from our founder and President, Nathan Waldman. He ran an oilfield service company in the early 80's that primarily focused on running downhole pressure gauges on electric-line for real-time surface readout. Most of the wells his company was involved with were deep, hot, geo-pressured, and frequently sour. This difficult combination of factors led to problems... lost equipment in the wellbore resulting in expensive fishing operations and exceptionally high costs for both the operator and the service company. The equipment required to test these types of well was ten times the cost of equipment used for normally pressured non-sour wells.

The second challenge in successfully performing pressure transient testing from the surface is to correctly convert the measured wellhead pressures to bottomhole pressures as the well changes from flowing to shut-in state. As liquid yields, flow rates, bottomhole temperatures, and pressure changes become more extreme, the complexity of the conversion algorithms grows exponentially. Further complicating the conversion are tapered tubing strings and deviated wellbores. The early generations of the SPIDR System were limited to dry gas wells (<50 BBLS/MMSCFD) or wells that flowed above the dew point at the wellhead regardless of the yield. As years went by and DRC's engineers introduced more rigorous conversion algorithms to the basic Cullender-Smith equation, DRC went from 50 BBLS/MMSCFD to 150 BBLS/MMSCFD to 300 BBLS/MMSCFD limits to today's ability to test almost any well that is self-unloading.

When the price of oil fell below $10 a barrel, the operators could no longer justify the costs and risks associated with testing these high-pressure, sour wells. Nathan wondered why wells couldn't be tested from the surface. He had been experimenting with the basic Cullender-Smith equation which could be used to convert surface pressure to bottomhole pressure in wells with single-phase gas and moderate bottomhole temperature. Nathan went back to the operators of these wells and proposed non-intervention testing from the surface at a small fraction of the cost of going down-hole and with none of the risk. After the surface testing concept was successfully demonstrated on several wells, Nathan sold his downhole service company and started Data Retrieval Corporation. The initial objective was to build a compact, self-powered, high precision data acquisition system that could be installed and used by the operators' field personnel without special training. The resultant product was the SPIDR well testing and data acquisition system, which is now in its eighth generation.

Finally, in order to obtain meaningful reservoir analysis, whether the data is acquired from the surface or from downhole measurements, it is essential to understand the test objectives and conduct the well test accordingly. DRC has been in business for over 20 years and plans, conducts and analyzes over 500 well tests per year. We have learned that test design is the first step to obtaining valid test results. A test design for completion evaluation testing is very different than that for limits testing, deliverability testing, fracture design testing, packer leakage testing, communication testing, etc. Using the SPIDR well testing system not only eliminates the high risk and expense of running gauges downhole, it also provides access to the most experienced team of reservoir engineers in the world at no additional charge.

Related Terms:

spidr gauge, spidr testing, spidr pressure gauge, spider gauge, spider testing, spider pressure gauge