dc.description.abstract | Well placement optimization is an important part of Petroleum Field Development.
However, in order to improve the optimization procedures, it can be important to
incorporate considerations like knowledge about the geology of the reservoir or
about existing or planned well paths. This leads to additional constraints that
have to be satisfied during the optimization. In this thesis we concentrate in
particular on constraints on the well lengths and the distance between the wells.
We suggest an alternating projections method to deal with both constraints at the
same time, and develop an efficient numerical method for the solution. Although we
cannot prove that the method is convergent, numerical results of our implementation
indicate that the approach works as intended.
An additional important contribution from this work is the
implementation of a well index calculator.
In reservoir simulation, the well index relates the flow rate
and pressure of the wellbore to the pressure solution of the
subsurface fluid flow system, and is therefore an essential
part in computing resulting production volumes.
We also implement an algorithm that, given a slanted
well and the physical state of a reservoir, calculates
the well indices for the well blocks that are intersected
by the well.
In particular the well index calculation for deviated wells
is a nontrivial task that is important for well placement
optimization research.
This task is already handled by some industry reservoir
simulators, but the implementation is hidden from the
end-user.
All of the implementations are meant to be an addition to FieldOpt, a petroleum
field development optimization framework that is currently under development by
the Petroleum Cybernetics Group at NTNU. | |