Overview

The success of oil & gas operations strongly depends on making proper decisions on development plan (number, location, type, drilling sequence, and controls of new wells). Closed-loop field development (CLFD) optimization is a comprehensive framework for optimal development of oil & gas resources, presented first in 2015. CLFD involves three major steps: 1) optimization of full development plan based on current set of models, 2) drilling new wells and collecting new spatial and temporal (production) data, 3) model calibration based on all data. This process is repeated until the optimal number of wells is drilled. In this talk, we first present an efficient CLFD implementation for complex systems described by multipoint geostatistics (MPS). Model calibration is accomplished in two steps: conditioning to spatial data by a geostatistical simulation method, and conditioning to production data by optimization-based PCA. A statistical procedure (TruMAP) is presented to assess the performance of CLFD. In a massive computational experiment, involving about 10 million reservoir simulation runs that took about 320,000 CPU hours, the methodology is applied to an oil reservoir example for 25 different true-model cases. Application of a single-step of CLFD, improved the true NPV in 64%-80% of cases. The full CLFD procedure (with three steps) improved the true NPV in 96% of cases, with an average improvement of 37%. These results indicate the effectiveness of performing multiple steps of closed-loop optimization.