Nonlinear approach for oil field optimisation based on gas lift optimisation

When the initial energy of a virgin reservoir is not sufficient or when this energy falls below a certain limit after a production history, the production rates won't be able to meet economic margins. It is then time for artificial lift methods to come to aid. Amongwhich, gas lift is the most commonly used scenario. Being somehow an ancient tool with an age of over a century, gas lift is though still a challenging problem when overall optimization is the concern. When the injection gas is of limited supply the problem is finding the best gas allocation scheme. However there are ever more cases emerging in certain geographic localities where the gas supplies are usually unlimited. The optimization problem then totally relates to the wellbore and completion string and fully engages with multiphase flow concepts. In the present study an intelligent genetic algorithm has been developed to simultaneously optimize all role playing factors, namely gas injection rate, injection depth and tubing diameter towards the maximum oil production rate with the water cut and injection pressure as the restrictions. The computations and real field data are mutually compared.