Integrated Planning to Optimize Field Development Strategies and Real Time Decision Making During Project Execution for Large Scale Shale Resource Projects

摘要

Integrated planning unveils insight into a large project and all its bottlenecks for every discipline. In order to optimize utilization of facilities, optimize scheduling and its subsequent operations, an integrated planning tool was developed especially for large scale and complex shale resource projects. The best option to come up with a suitable planning tool for such projects was found to be an Agent Based Model (ABM). Flexible definition of the individual components of the model, which comprises the subsurface, surface data, and the physical representation of wells, pipelines and equipment, allows effective strategy testing of various scenarios. With the chosen approach, results could be obtained fast and also numerous variations of the original development strategy could be tested and included. It can be shown that through optimization of facilities and optimized scheduling for an asset, economical benefits can be found effectively. It tremendously reduces the time for strategy testing of conventional approaches and also updates due to new development strategies as new information is available. Scheduling and an analysis of various drilling strategies allow a further reduction of economics. It can be concluded that this approach allows more effective testing of strategies for large assets, which involves cross-functional decision making. It allows effective communication and immediately shows possible shortcomings of any strategy which otherwise would be overlooked with any other approach that does not involve everything from the resource itself, to the production system, contractual conditions as well as a representation of the actual field operations.