Optimization of Well Placement and Production for Large - scale Mature Oil Fields

Abstract

Optimal oil field development strategies, especially well locations and production strategies for mature oil fields, should be determined to sustain yields. For a large-scale oil field, these problems are nonlinear, nonconvex, and computationally expensive. In this study, an efficient and robust derivative-free computational framework was developed to determine the optimal number, locations, and injection/production rates of infill wells for mature oil fields. The characteristics of mature fields were briefly described; optimization formulation and computational framework were presented. For this problem, the robust and parallelizable PSwarm, a hybrid of a pattern search algorithm and a particle swarm optimization, was investigated. The approach was applied to a large-scale real oil field that currently includes approximately 200 wells. Our optimized results were compared with those of the current plan provided by the oil industry. In particular, a higher oil production with the same amount of water injection and a higher net present value were obtained by our optimized approach than by the current plan. Therefore, the new derivative-free computational framework can efficiently solve well placement and production optimization problems for large-scale mature oil fields.