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

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 Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2014, 53 (27), 11033] 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.