Surrogate-based Optimization of Horizontal Well Placement in a Mature Oil Reservoir

Abstract

Exploitation of mature oil reservoirs has forced researchers to find ways for enhancing production from such reservoirs. An effective way to do so is drilling horizontal wells. There are many advantages for these kinds of wells but they require extra investment for drilling and completion. The objective of this research is to choose location, direction, and length of a new horizontal well to maximize accumulative oil production over a planning horizon. The authors employ various metamodeling techniques in order to build a good approximate model for estimation of accumulated outflow from each well scenario. This leads to a significant reduction in the computation time. The authors built and compared 18 metamodels based on quadratic, multiplicative, and radial basis functions for the reservoir under study. Then, the best model was introduced to a global optimization search using a Genetic algorithm. Numerical results showed that 3 million barrels of more oil could be produced from the designated well as compared with those of the initial scenarios, which is a significant improvement.