Generalized Multi-Scale Stochastic Reservoir Opportunity Index for enhanced well placement optimization under uncertainty in green and brownfields

Abstract

Well placement planning is one of the challenging issues in any field development plan. Reservoir engineers always confront the problem that which point of the field should be drilled to achieve the highest recovery factor and/or maximum sweep efficiency. In this paper, we use Reservoir Opportunity Index (ROI) as a spatial measure of productivity potential for greenfields, which hybridizes the reservoir static properties, and for brownfields, ROI is replaced by Dynamic Measure (DM), which takes into account the current dynamic properties in addition to static properties. The purpose of using these criteria is to diminish the search region of optimization algorithms and as a consequence, reduce the computational time and cost of optimization, which are the main challenges in well placement optimization problems. However, considering the significant subsurface uncertainty, a probabilistic definition of ROI (SROI) or DM (SDM) is needed, since there exists an infinite number of possible distribution maps of static and/or dynamic properties. To build SROI or SDM maps, the k-means clustering technique is used to extract a limited number of characteristic realizations that can reasonably span the uncertainties. In addition, to determine the optimum number of clustered realizations, Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD) method is applied which can also compress the data for large models in a lower-dimensional space. Additionally, we introduce the multiscale spatial density of ROI or DM (D2ROI and D2DM), which can distinguish between regions of high SROI (or SDM) in arbitrary neighborhood windows from the local SROI (or SDM) maxima with low values in the vicinity. Generally, we develop and implement a new systematic approach for well placement optimization for both green and brownfields on a synthetic reservoir model. This approach relies on the utilization of multi-scale maps of SROI and SDM to improve the initial guess for optimization algorithm. Narrowing down the search region for optimization algorithm can substantially speed up the convergence and hence the computational cost would be reduced by a factor of 4.