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Automated Field Development Planning for Unconventional Shale Gas
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, ECMOR XIV - 14th European Conference on the Mathematics of Oil Recovery, Sep 2014, Volume 2014, p.1 - 15
Abstract
We present a framework that automatically generates an optimal well placement plan (WPP) based on a reservoir model of a shale gas field. The proposed WPP comprises wells, surface locations such as pads, well completion locations, and the drilling schedule. A suite of high-speed computational components allows generating this WPP in minutes. Different development strategies can be rapidly investigated.
The WPP is optimized using a constrained downhill-simplex approach. During a trial, WPPs proposed by the optimizer in previous trials were extrapolated to propose a new WPP. The proposed WPP must satisfy a wide range of geometric, operational, contractual, and legal constraints on the surface as well as in the overburden and reservoir. When a feasible WPP is discovered during a trial, the production forecast is computed using a high-speed semianalytic reservoir simulator. The framework supports a variety of objective functions, including recovery, net present value, return on investment, and profitability index. Optimization in the presence of subsurface uncertainty considers an ensemble of reservoir models. A proposed WPP will then have an uncertainty in the forecast value. For a specified aversion to risk, a conservative or aggressive WPP can then be optimized.