Field development projects optimization integrated to risk analysis

Author(s)

Cristina Cledia Mezzomo

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Faculdade de Engenharia Mecânica
• Defense date: 2005-10-19

Examining board members

Denis José Schiozer; Clóvis Raimundo Maliska; Cesar Luiz Palagi; Rogerio Ferreira de Paiva; Saul Barisnik Suslick

• Advisor: Denis José Schiozer

Abstract

Field developrnent planning is a very cornplex process due to uncertainties, related to the restricted amount of information available for the high number of variables with dynamic behavior. The most common tool for this process is reservoir simulation that provides production forecasts and is associated to optimization algorithms for the optimization of a non-linear objective-function previously stated, regarding the objectives for the project. Although this is a complex process, manual procedures are often used to select a recovery strategy. Some studies have been developed to obtain automatic procedures. Some tests have been published with the objective of developing an automatic process. However. none of these approaches seem to be the most adequate regarding that (I) the manual approach requires excessive time from the professionals involved and may not consider all the necessary scenarios in order to avoid long times for projects planning and (2) the automatic approaches presented until this moment requires a very large amount of simulations and are unfeasible for actual reservoirs. The approach for field development plan selection proposed in th1s work takes advantages of both approaches and is composed by a sequence of manual and automated procedures. This enables to integrate the parameters definition for the development plan to a risk analysis (technical, operational, geological, and economic, etc.). The procedure for field development plan selection can still be integrated with an adequate decision analysis using, for example, multiattributes utility theory. The main idea is to propose a procedure that can be applied to a large set of reservoirs, providing the fundamentals to choose the most adequate choice for the initial field development, regarding the risks related and objectives classification for the project. Severa] examples with different characteristics were evaluated and the results indicate that this procedure is very flexible and it can be adapted to consider the characteristics and objectives stated to each project with a low computational cost that can be stated for each case (AU)