Integration of oilfield planning problems: infrastructure design, development planning and production scheduling

The oil and gas industry faces considerable technological challenges nowadays, mainly associated with nonconventional reserves and offshore environments. To ensure the economic efficiency of operations under such complicated conditions, industrial solutions called "smart fields" were introduced. A vital part of these solutions is strategic planning which aims to coordinate field development and hydrocarbons production operations to optimize the entire field lifecycle, given the chosen planning criterion (e.g., net present value of the project). Still, in many cases engineering design is conducted with a conservative approach of solving one problem at a time. In this study, a multi-period mixed integer nonlinear problem (MINLP) covering the relevant issues of both development and production phases, is introduced. The contribution of the proposed model to the area of oilfield development planning is related to the model's simultaneously incorporating technological details regarding the infrastructure layout, pressures and flows in the gathering system, and artificial lift performance, all of which ultimately aims to provide realistic production scheduling results and cost evaluation. The composed model is used to study the benefits of joint development and production planning in comparison to planning these two phases of the project separately. This research is relevant to the engineering design departments and contractors for the preliminary design stage of the engineering project when the infrastructures layout and capacities are chosen, and rough estimates of costs and revenues are calculated.