Results of Real-Time Production Optimization of a maturing North Sea Gas Asset with Production Constraints

Operating maturing assets poses increasingly complex challenges to operators. Meeting hourly or daily production targets becomes more difficult when wells are more often shut in for e.g. water washes (against salt deposition) or solvent jobs (at asphaltenes deposition). Declining reservoir pressure in turn results in less margin to compensate lost production while topside facilities can put constraints when production GOR and watercut increase at late production life. In a joint industry project of Wintershall, GdF, EBN, Siemens and TNO the applicability of real-time optimization is explored. The problem description, system architecture and initial optimizer results were presented in Linden (2013). This paper presents results of the optimization project and looks ahead to further field realization. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that production of a mature North Sea gas asset can be optimized taking into account realistic constraints. All wells at this gas asset are intermittently shut in for water washes while daily nominations must be met. It will be shown that the optimization algorithm obeys the constraints and is fast enough for real-time application and thereby ready for field implementation.