
pun out of Calnetix Technologies, a California-based company producing machinery and power generation technologies, Upwing Energy emerged in 2011 as it developed its Subsurface Compressor System (SCS). Over the next decade, Upwing developed, tested and trialed its SCS, leading to a funding initiative in 2018 from Equinor Technology Ventures and Cooper and Co. The initiative helped accelerate the development of the downhole gas compressor.
Simultaneously, Upwing developed its Enhanced Production Simulator, a tool that analyzes conventional and unconventional wells and calculates the incremental producible reserves based on specific parameters.
Upwing Energy CEO Herman Artinian recently talked with E&P Plus about the company’s evolution, how the company’s technologies work and the state of the artificial lift industry.
While demonstrating waste heat recovery systems in oil and gas fields in 2011, Calnetix became more familiar with oil and gas field operations and identified the need for more advanced artificial lift technologies to extract more hydrocarbons from existing assets. The company created a strategic initiative to develop a subsurface compressor prototype to prove the concept of downhole compression. With the successful proof-of-concept field trials, Upwing Energy was formed.
From an engineering and physics standpoint, we knew we could make subsurface compression work, but we didn’t know for certain what a huge difference in production it would make and how the reservoir would respond until we did our trials. The data only available from our tool are shedding new light on the available reserves and opening up new production strategies for E&Ps in both conventional and unconventional formations.
Subsurface compression provides another huge win from an environmental standpoint as well. Unlike surface compression, there is no risk of leaks into the environment, and there is a significant savings in carbon emissions. In fact, over 9 million tons of CO2 equivalent can be offset by removing a wellhead compressor and replacing it with an SCS. In addition, operators can take advantage of the fact that we are a certified carbon neutral supplier.

Upwing is positioning itself as a service company that will enable operators to increase production and recoverability instead of just selling a tool. Upwing will evaluate the assets and take the lead on deploying and operating its advanced systems for a monthly fee. This reduces the capital requirements for an operator and puts the responsibility on Upwing for the equipment.
The Enhanced Production Simulation (EPS) developed by Upwing incorporates reservoir and wellbore characteristics, the wellhead conditions and the SCS operating ranges to predict incremental production. The simulation utilizes both an analytical approach and a numerical simulation to converge the results. Because the SCS enables deliquification at the wellbore (and therefore multiphase production), it is important to keep the velocities above critical along the production tubing.

The SCS optimizes both the compressor parameters and the completion geometry to maximize the production. This process is constantly monitored and calculated via internally developed autonomous controls to adjust the speed and the torque of the compressor as there are pressure changes in the gathering lines as well as production fluid density changes. This is all possible due to the significant amount of new data now available through the SCS.
The subsurface compressor consists of two main components—a high-speed hermetically sealed permanent magnet motor with magnetic bearings and a hybrid wet gas compressor. These two components are coupled by a magnetic coupling that conveys torque from the hermetically sealed motor to the compressor with no mechanical shaft or seals, so there is no need for a motor protector to isolate the motor from downhole fluids. The SCS’ protector-less architecture provides an extremely reliable rotating solution for lower total cost of ownership and can also be applied to oil recovery. The topside variable frequency drive controls the motor at high speeds without any speed sensors.
Upwing’s SCS is the only downhole turbomachinery that can maximize gas and condensate production, recoverable reserves, gas-in-place recovery efficiency and liquid unloading at the same time. All of these benefits can be realized in any type of formation and wellbore geometry in both the onshore and offshore environments regardless of where the well is within its life span.