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PETROMAKS2-Stort program petroleum

Digital wells for optimal production and drainage

Alternative title: Digitale brønner for optimal produksjon

Awarded: NOK 12.6 mill.

Project "DigiWell" will develop new knowledge and tools for prediction and operation of the production on oil and gas fields under uncertainty. United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals include focus on Affordable and Clean Energy for all, and Climate Action. The rapid increase in global energy consumption will enforce improvements in sustainable energy technology, but any realistic near-future scenarios will include a mixture of energy sources, including fossil fuel. The developed knowledge and tools of "DigiWell" are equally relevant to sustainable energy sources, and "DigiWell" will as a by-product help speed up the transition to sustainable energy usage. "DigiWell" will contribute to automatic production optimization which is expected to increase oil production efficiency by 2-3%, reduce CO2 intensity and emission, and reduce chemical use. Specifically, "DigiWell" will extend an existing open source reservoir simulation tool with integrated and improved handling of uncertainty in available oil/gas, geometry and properties of reservoirs, supporting equipment, infrastructure, and economy/price, while also including the effect of short-term operational plan. Open source tools will be developed to reduce uncertainties in short-term sensor information, and to improve automated multi-well production coordination which takes uncertainty into consideration. The tools will include the possibility to learn from "Big data", as these become available. The uncertainty can also be reduced by selecting more relevant sensor data and actuators, and methods to choose these will be developed. In total, "DigiWell" is expected to improve operation both wrt. energy consumption, environment footprint, and economy.

Affordable and clean energy for everyone, and actions for an improved climate, are two of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Any realistic energy solution must combine the entire portfolio of possible energy sources with a gradual transition from the current fossil based economy to a fully sustainable energy economy. To improve the climate in this transition, energy efficiency in oil production must be maximized together with profit. The project aims at developing new methods, algorithms, and tools for oil production with maximized profit and minimum energy consumption under uncertain information. Uncertainties relate to (i) unknown future prices/cost, (ii) uncertainties in operational allocation, and (iii) uncertain knowledge of reservoir and equipment. The project aims at pushing the knowledge front describing profit and energy consumption and how it varies with operational parameters and uncertainty. By combining these cost functions with developed tools of physics models of oil-fields both on short term (minutes-hours) and long term (years), this leads to quantitative short term and long term models which are suitable for developing and testing control algorithms. To maximize short term profit, large scale algorithms for coordinating control for multiple wells under uncertainty will be developed and tested in the modelling tool, while adaptivity of the control algorithms will be tested on the long term models. Feedback control reduces the detrimental effect of uncertainty, and data reconciliation algorithms will be developed to maximize the information content. Because the control architecture determines attainable feedback performance, methods will be developed to select actuators and sensors in new fields. New, hybrid methods combining data driven methods with physics models will help reduce the limitations of physics models for poorly understood, new fields.

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Funding scheme:

PETROMAKS2-Stort program petroleum