Estimating Optimum Well Spacing in a Middle East Onshore Oil Field Using a Genetic-Algorithm-Optimization Approach

摘要

In developing phase of a hydrocarbon reservoir and planning for drilling the production wells, it is necessary to drill these wells in an appropriate spacing to achieve maximum economic revenues, during reservoir life span. Traditionally, the optimum well spacing has been determined graphically from a plot of economic return versus spacing among the wells. This paper derives an equation to solve this problem directly without the plot and presents an illustrative example for its application in a recent developed Iranian onshore oil field. Then we optimize achieved function using a genetic algorithm (GA) approach with an initial random population with 20 chromosomes and 100 generation number as main optimization engine in order to finding optimum well spacing versus maximum project NPV. Our procedure show a well-matched results with figures that calculated by project contractor achieving from a trial and error process during defining the field developing scenarios.