Multi-objective well placement optimization considering energy sustainability along with economical gains

Determining the optimum well locations while developing a field contributes significantly to efficient reservoir management. Most optimization problems have focused on maximizing the Net Present Value (NPV) of the project. However, the ultimate aim of projects differs between international and national oil companies. The primary aim of international oil companies (IOCs) is to maximize its profit (NPV). As far as a national oil company is concerned, apart from maximizing NPV one of its main objective is to sustain its resources for as long as possible by delaying abandonment i.e., national oil companies (NOCs) aim to increase the field recovery factor (RF) by maintaining a long period of plateau production. Therefore, a multi-objective approach is presented which incorporates both NPV and RF as objective functions in well placement and rate optimization of Brugge field. The technique of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) was used to solve the optimization problem. The search for optimum well locations was conducted in three stages. In the first stage, only NPV was used as the objective function while in the second stage it was only RF. In the third stage, objective function was a weighted sum of NPV and RF in which a set of three weights was used to describe the relative importance of NPV and RF. A comparison of how these weights affect the optimized NPV and RF values is presented. The approach quantitatively clearly differentiates between the operating strategies of NoCs and IoCs and shows how to balance between maximizing profitability and keeping RF as stable as possible. The method takes care for both IoCs and NoCs to optimize the financial aspect (NPV) and the energy sustainability aspect (RF) of field development projects. This technique presents a realistic NPV estimation while keeping a balance in RF for both companies.