Integrated Oil-Field Management: From Well Placement and Planning to Production Scheduling

Abstract

Integrated management can benefit oil-field development and exploitation tremendously. It involves holistic decisions on the order, placement, timing, capacities, and allocations of new well drillings and surface facilities such as manifolds, surface centers, and their interconnections, along with well production/injection profiles. These decisions have profound long-term impacts on field productivity; however, the dynamic nature of oil reservoirs makes them strongly intertwined and highly complex. Hence, a dynamic, holistic, and integrated approach is necessary. Most existing well placement studies ignore surface effects and drilling-rig availability and assume that all wells are opened simultaneously at the beginning of the production horizon. In this work, we extend our previous study [ Tavallali Tavallali Ind. Eng. Chem. Res.20145311033] and develop a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) approach for addressing such limiting assumptions. We develop a revised outer-approximation algorithm involving two multiperiod, nonconvex MINLPs and several local search strategies. Numerical results for a literature example show significant improvement in the net present value for oil-field development.

Supply chain networks servicing upstream operations in oil and gas fields after the shale revolution

“…More recently, they emphasize that O&G developments can be greatly favored by the integrated management at all levels. 23 Even though these works are just concerned with the planning and location of new wells and surface facilities (manifolds, interconnections, etc. ), they clearly state that decisions are actually complex and have profound impacts on the field productivity.…”

Process systems engineering perspective on the planning and development of oil fields

“… (see the Field Planning and Surface Network Design section) and the third in ref. (see the Integrated Field Design and Operation section).…”

“…Because the reservoir dynamics are slow, many researchers have justifiably assumed the subsurface to be steady or pseudo‐steady over a short horizon and have used a multiperiod approach for long horizons. Except for a few that have considered flow scheduling along with surface network design or well placement, most works have assumed a fixed surface network. Although some researchers have used open‐box models based on mathematical programming, most have used black‐ or gray‐box models.…”

“…Thus, an integrated approach would be desirable. Tavallali and coworkers and Rahmawati et al have attempted such integration.…”

“…In contrast to the previous studies, Tavallali and Karimi used an analytical MINLP approach for multireservoir field development. After their success with an open‐box subsurface model for well placement and detailed surface network design, they further their integrated approach extended to address the timings for well drilling in a single, large monolithic model. They also added flow‐splitting capability to their model, where a well could send its flow to multiple manifolds and centers indirectly or directly.…”