Well Placement Optimization with Geological Uncertainty Reduction

Well placement optimization aims to determine optimal well locations so that the economic benefit from oil production can be maximized. Geological uncertainty has a significant impact on the optimal well placement plan and therefore has to be considered in the well placement optimization problem. A geological realization reduction framework for well placement under geological uncertainty is proposed in this work. The objective is to optimally select a small subset of realizations and incorporate them into the well placement optimization problem, so as to reduce the computational efforts. A reservoir case study demonstrates that the selected smaller subset of realizations is a very good representation of a larger superset of realizations and can significantly decrease the computational time associated with the well placement optimization problem.