Stabilizing gas-lift well dynamics with free operating point

Gas-lift is one of the most used artificial lift methods worldwide. In Brazil it responds for more than 70% of the total oil production. Gas-lift wells are known to present oscillatory behavior associated with phenomena like heading and density wave. This work presents an innovative way to control these oscillations. The approach adopted controls the well dynamics without fixing any operational set point, decoupling the dynamic control from the optimization algorithm.