Abstract:
Field Development Planning (FDP) included finding the appropriate location and design of wells, drilling activities schedule, and other infrastructures’ placement (such as drilling centers, gathering centers, processing units and pipelines). It is usually performed to maximize the economic recovery of a hydrocarbon reservoir while minimizing the environmental footprint. Among multiple decisions during this stage, two important factors should be investigated: well placement and scheduling throughout time and wellbore trajectory design. The drilling schedule outlines the ideal timing and order for drilling activities to maximize the return on investments from proven hydrocarbon reserves. Such a plan considers several parameters like the time-lapse reservoir’s physical properties (e.g. fluid saturations), the prescribed number of wells to be drilled at a given time (based on rig availability), and their types (injectors and/or producers).
In this work, we incorporate a drilling schedule module in a field development planning platform, where a specified number and types of predefined wells are set to meet a certain production target rate. The implemented algorithms enable optimal placement of the development wells through time, hence minimizing the number of wells while maximizing the recovery. We build a time-dependent Net Hydrocarbon Thickness Map (NHCTM) that change throughout the life of the hydrocarbon reservoir due to change in fluid saturations. This NHCTM is used to optimally place wells from a drilling schedule. Well trajectories for the proposed wells are then designed and the overall system is modeled using a commercial reservoir simulator that is controlled from the field development planning framework.
This proposed workflow is applied to the Olympus optimization benchmark which illustrates a complex green field development challenge and results are compared to existing “static” well placement optimization results where wells are placed beforehand at the beginning of the life of the oil or gas field.
