Hierarchical Economic Optimization of Oil Production from Petroleum Reservoirs

In oil production waterflooding is a popular recovery technology, which involves the injection of water into an oil reservoir. Studies on model-based dynamic optimization of waterflooding strategies have demonstrated that there is a significant potential to increase lifecycle performance, measured in Net Present Value. However, in these studies the complementary desire of oil companies to maximize daily production is generally neglected. To resolve this, a hierarchical optimization structure is proposed that regards economic life-cycle performance as primary objective and daily production as secondary objective. The existence of redundant degrees of freedom allows for the optimization of the secondary objective without compromising optimality of the primary objective.