Abstract:

Field development projects involve several variables and demand different teams of professionals in the oil industry. Different software and techniques are applied to minimize investments. Sometimes it is difficult to put all these parts together in a synchronized way.

This work describes an optimizing approach that uses the current techniques of the different majors in a same procedure. The objective function consists of a cost function whose data generator is the ECLIPSE reservoir simulator. The optimizing procedure, using the polytope search method, generates the input data file for the reservoir simulator for each polytope movement. Then, the cost function, considering the simulation results and the oil industry cost parameters, returns the cash flow analysis for the actual case. In this way, the polytope moves on an imaginary net whose nodes are based on simulator runs.

This approach requires an interface between the optimizing module and the reservoir simulator. The optimizing module consists of a main routine that generates the input for the reservoir simulator and dispatches the simulator run. The cost function reads the simulation results from a file and returns the cash flow analysis.

Because we need to define the problem and interfacing difficulties properly the following base case was considered first: when an off-shore oil field production starts declining a second field comes into production to achieve the maximum capacity of the installed facilities. For the same reasons, this work considers two parameters: the time when the second field starts producing and how long the development time lasts.

The obtained results are different from the intuitive guess showing that, for the studied case, the obvious solution can cause the unnecessary disbursement of large amounts of money.

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Copyright 1994, Antonio Carlos Bittencourt de Andrade Filho: 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, Antonio Carlos Bittencourt de Andrade Filho.