Monitoring well effluent plunger lift operations

摘要

Well effluent plunger lift operations, wherein a plunger (1) cyclically moves up and down through a hydrocarbon fluid production well to remove solid, viscous and/or liquid well effluent deposits (13) therefrom, are monitored by a fiber optical Distributed Vibration Sensing(DVS) assembly (16,17) which is arranged along at least part of the length of the wellbore(3) and is configured to monitor the movement of the plunger (1), well effluents and/or deposits (13) by monitoring vibrations (40), which may be triggered by thermal events, such as temperature differences between gaseous well effluents, deposits (13) and/or the plunger (1), and/or acoustic events, such as noise resulting from a motion and/or position of the plunger (1) and/or of the deposits (13) within the wellbore(3).