Abstract:

Smart wells are wells that have downhole instrumentation, such as sensors and valves, onthe production tubing. These wells provide the ability for both downhole monitoring andcontrol. Downhole monitoring can be achieved through the use of sensors while controlis realized with downhole valves. Once a smart well is deployed, valves can be used toindependently control each segment / branch of the well in a reactive mode, such asshutting off a zone once it starts producing water, or in a defensive mode, which requiresthe a priori determination of valve settings. Using the latter approach, which is themethod applied in this work, valve settings are determined through an optimizationprocedure. We show with this procedure that well instrumentation can provide over 50%gain in cumulative oil recovery over the uninstrumented case for systems considered herein which the geology is assumed to be known. Because the geology is not known in realapplications, we couple the valve optimization procedure with history matchingtechniques, in which we use idealized sensor data to update the reservoir description. Upto 90% of the gain attainable with known geology is achieved for the unconditionally andconditionally generated models considered. In addition, we show that it is beneficial touse multiple history-matched models for the optimization in some cases. This is becausemultiple history-matched models capture the geologic uncertainty better than singlehistory-matched models. We also introduce efficient alternative procedures to improvethe speed of the overall technique. These include the use of a Levenberg-Marquardtalgorithm for the optimizations.

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Copyright 2004, Inegbenose Aitokhuehi: Please note that the reports and theses are copyright to their original authors. Authors have given written permission for their work to be made available here. Readers who download reports from this site should honor the copyright of the original authors and may not copy or distribute the work further without the permission of the author, Inegbenose Aitokhuehi.