Practical extremum-seeking control for gas-lifted oil production

Abstract

We present a distributed extremum seeking algorithm for the problem of production optimization of multiple gas lifted wells. The algorithm is based on “synchronization” of production performance gradients for all individual wells. It mimics the manual optimization method employed by production engineers in industry. Thus due to better understanding by industrial specialists, this method may have higher chances of being accepted in the oil and gas industry compared to other data-driven optimization methods. Performance of the proposed algorithm is illustrated by simulations.