Process measurements are of vital importance for monitoring and control of industrial plants. When we consider offshore oil production platforms, wells that require gas-lift technology to yield oil production from low pressure oil reservoirs can become unstable under some conditions. This undesirable phenomenon is usually called slugging flow, and can be identified by an oscillatory behavior of...

Before promising locations at petroliferous basins become productive oil wells, it is often necessary to complete drilling activities at these locations. The scheduling of such activities must satisfy several conflicting constraints and attain a number of goals. Moreover, resource displacements between wells are also important. We describe a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) f...

This is an interview conducted with an oil and gas worker who was employed in the industry from 1993 to 2012. He requested that his name not be used. From 2008 to 2012, he drilled wells for a major operator in Bradford County, Pennsylvania. Bradford County is the center of the Marcellus shale gas boom in Northeastern Pennsylvania. In 2012, he formed a consulting business to assist clients who n...

Oil is a major source of income for Ecuador and since the 1970s has been the " engine " of the nation's economy. Before the 1970s oil price boom, Ecuador was one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Since then, oil production has been the primary cause of Ecuador's economic growth, which has averaged 7% annually. Per capita income rose from US$ 290 in 1972 to US$ 1 200 in 2000. Today, oil...

A variety of optimization problems associated with oil production involve cost functions and constraints that require calls to a subsurface flow simulator. In many situations gradient information cannot be obtained efficiently, or a global search is required. This motivates the use of derivative-free (non-invasive, blackbox) optimization methods. This chapter describes the use of several deriva...

The use of multilateral well is becoming an emerging method to improve oil recovery efficiently and to drain reservoirs more efficacious. By developing drilling technology, completing the oil wells as multilateral wells become more interesting especially from economic point of view. On the other hand, lack of any means for forecasting the performance of this type of wells causes drilling of...