An Assessment of Model-Based Multiobjective Optimization for Efficient Management of Subsurface Flow

Summary The making of development plan to produce an oil or gas field usually involves several distinct stakeholders (e.g., the operator, partners and the government) with many engineering, economic, environmental, and/or political considerations. The interests of these stakeholders may be potentially in conflict with each other, entailing that a robust development plan should take into account all these concerns. Multiobjective optimization (MOO) can be used to find a set of optimal solutions (i.e., the so-called Pareto front) to balance all these interests. This work reviews and presents several typical applications of MOO to illustrate its value for efficient and robust reservoir management (RM) and asset development. These applications include: (i) simultaneous optimization of oil recovery and unwanted fluids, (ii) states-constrained optimization, (iii) short-term and long-term optimization, and (iv) optimization under uncertainty (OUU) for risk mitigation. Particularly, the MOO solution is compared with a conventional single-objective optimization (SOO) method in handling these problems. Results show that MOO is a solution of choice for comprehensive RM when a project involves optimizing multiple metrics or multiple drivers.