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Abstract

One of the key issues in reservoir development is where to drill a new well. The economic implications of a wrong decision can imply a decrease in the total amount of produced oil and/or an increase in operational costs. The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for determining where a production well should be drilled. A mathematical modeling procedure for finding the optimum location of wells in an underground reservoir is presented. The problem is solved through the simultaneous use of an algorithm which searches for global optimums and a reservoir simulator to evaluate the objective function. The search algorithm is a combination of stochastic exploration of the domain and heuristic calculation of a descent direction, in order to avoid stopping the algorithm at a local maximum. The objective function used is the cumulative oil production from the moment the new well has been drilled. It is straightforward to change the objective function to another one that describes better the economic issue, for example net present value. This does not imply major modifications in the way the methodology has been implemented and in its speed of convergence. An example was chosen to test the methodology. It is a 2D 28x28 grid with smooth changes in porosity and permeability. The methodology was designed to take advantage of a cluster of workstation. In general, it has been found that the wall-clock time to determine the best location scales a function of .9 times the number of used processors.

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/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.201411188
1994-06-07
2024-03-29
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