Oil Reservoir Production Optimization using Single Shooting and ESDIRK Methods

Conventional recovery techniques enable recovery of 10-50% of the oil in an oil field. Advances in smart well technology and enhanced oil recovery techniques enable significant larger recovery. To realize this potential, feedback model-based optimal control technologies are needed to manipulate the injections and oil production such that flow is uniform in a given geological structure.

Even in the case of conventional water flooding, feedback based optimal control technologies may enable higher oil recovery than with conventional operational strategies. The optimal control problems that must be solved are large-scale problems and require specialized numerical algorithms. In this paper, we combine a single shooting optimization algorithm based on sequential quadratic programming (SQP) with explicit singly diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta (ESDIRK) integration methods and the a continuous adjoint method for sensitivity computation.

We demonstrate the procedure on a water ooding example with conventional injectors and producers.