Capacitive compensation in electrical power systems feeding deep petroleum well stations

Today, most of the deep petroleum extraction systems, using centrifugal type pumps, are being activated by electronic frequency converters. In the presence of a weak energy transmission system, where capacitive compensation to improve voltage profile is required, power electronics converters that inject a high harmonic content toward the network, may cause a great number of problems in the electric power system like resonance, heating, derating of equipment, etc. Obviously this problem must be carefully analyzed. In this work, the different components of: the electric power system, the frequency electronic converter and the induction machine, are modeled using the ATP (Alternative Transient Program) software in order to evaluate the harmonic injections in the load flow. This simulation evaluates the impact of different reactive compensation alternatives in the network and the converter.