Horizontal oil wells have already dramatically improved the productivity and reduced the cost of oil and gas fields. The objective of this project is to bring the technology to the next level by providing tools for predicting and performing optimal control of the flow between the wells and the oil reservoir. To reach the production optimum from the long horizontal wells, each segment has to be controlled to ensure uniform depletion and prevent loss of reserves by premature water or gas breakthrough. To achieve this goal, this project aims at realizing the integration of the four different models: reservoir modelling, reservoir simulation, well flow control, and numerical optimization methods.
The overarching goal of the proposed research activities is to enable a simulation tool with Reservoir to well connectivity. Efficient and physically correct simulations of the in-and-out flow of wells. Link between CFD simulations of well-flow and finite difference simulations of reservoir scale for multi-scale simulations.
This PhD project is a part of the framework of the project “Optimizing Oil Production by Novel Technology Integration - OPTION”, supported by the Danish National Foundation for Advanced Technologies.
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Allan P. Engsig-Karup, apek@dtu.dk
Consultant, Stefan Lemvig Glimberg
Co-Supervisor: Senior researcher. Wei Yan, weya@kemi.dtu.dk
Global Technical Head, Formation Damage, Michael Byrne