Well Placement Optimization with Geological Uncertainty Reduction

摘要

Well placement optimization aims to determine optimal well locations so that the economic benefit from oil production can be maximized. Geological uncertainty has a significant impact on the optimal well placement plan and therefore has to be considered in the well placement optimization problem. A geological realization reduction framework for well placement under geological uncertainty is proposed in this work. The objective is to optimally select a small subset of realizations and incorporate them into the well placement optimization problem, so as to reduce the computational efforts. A reservoir case study demonstrates that the selected smaller subset of realizations is a very good representation of a larger superset of realizations and can significantly decrease the computational time associated with the well placement optimization problem.