Typically, the production and drilling schedule must be decided upon at early stages of field planning with limited and highly uncertain information. In subsequent stages of field development, the decisions regarding the wells and the platform facilities are often unalterable despite the availability of new information that might prompt an adjustment of the design basis. Additionally, the process of creating a field development plan is often complex, time-consuming and often sub-optimal solutions are used. Thus, field development planning typically involves innumerous parameter sensitivity studies and uncertainty analysis to achieve reliable solutions, which on its turn require efficient and scalable solutions.A field of two neighboring reservoirs was discovered in the Barents Sea in 2014. The challenges of scheduling the use and transportation of the drilling rig have grown sharply in the Arctic area, especially because of the reduced allowed time-window of drilling operations and limited availability of special drilling rig equipment. After a successful extended production testing (EWT) of an appraisal well in 2017, a tentative production and drilling schedule was defined based on traditional cross-domain collaborations and group works from several related disciplines. In this work, we employed mathematical programming methods to model and optimize the scheduling problem considering the several operational and technical constraints.We demonstrate the benefits of utilizing mathematical programming for field development optimization through a comprehensive uncertainties’ analysis involving the reservoir size, productivity index, oil price and well count. The results show that the use of mathematical programming allows the field planner to test and analyze different scenarios before its implementation, making it easier for decision-makers to adapt to the continuously changing of new information and risk assessment in a dynamic environment.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

The Use of Mathematical Programming to Determine Optimal Production and Drilling Schedule in an Offshore Oil Field– a Case Study From the Barents Sea

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/OMAE/OMAE2021/volume/85116

OMAE 2021

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