The present work investigated the use of an echo state network for a gas lift oil well. The main contribution is the evaluation of the network performance under conditions normally faced in a real production system: noisy measurements, unmeasurable disturbances, sluggish behavior and model mismatch. The main pursued objective was to verify if this tool is suitable to compose a predictive control scheme for the analyzed operation. A simpler model was used to train the neural network and a more accurate process model was used to generate time series for validation. The system performance was investigated with distinct sample sizes for training, test and validation procedures and prediction horizons. The performance of the designed ESN was characterized in terms of slugging, setpoint changes and unmeasurable disturbances. It was observed that the size and the dynamic content of the training set tightly affected the network performance. However, for data sets with reasonable information contents, the obtained ESN performance could be regarded as very good, even when longer prediction horizons were proposed.