Fractures effects on smart wells optimization

Smart wells, wells equipped with smart completion, provide great potential to improve the recovery from hydrocarbon resources. Smart wells provide the ability to control uncertainties associated with reservoir heterogeneity. One example is to mitigate unexpected water production due to fractures and hence increase the ultimate recovery. Due to subsurface communication between laterals that have different productivity indices, it is difficult in practice to optimize production from smart wells. The optimization of smart wells involves more than one parameter. These parameters include the settings of the down hole inflow control valves (ICV) that act as a subsurface chokes. This research proposed a technique to quantify the effect of fractures on the optimization process to provide recommendations of further analysis. Genetic algorithm (GA) was used as the main optimization engine to find the optimum ICV configuration. The commercial reservoir simulator Eclipse was used as the objective function evaluator that assesses how good an ICV configuration is

Keywords:

Fracture , Smart wells , Reservoir , Optimization , Inflow control valve (ICV)