1. An Automatic Well Planner for Complex Well Trajectories
- Author
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Brage S. Kristoffersen, Thiago Lima Silva, Mathias C. Bellout, and Carl Fredrik Berg
- Subjects
Mathematical optimization ,Artificial neural network ,Test data generation ,Geosteering ,0208 environmental biotechnology ,Channelized ,02 engineering and technology ,010502 geochemistry & geophysics ,Planner ,01 natural sciences ,020801 environmental engineering ,Mathematics (miscellaneous) ,Differential evolution ,Trajectory ,General Earth and Planetary Sciences ,InformationSystems_MISCELLANEOUS ,Representation (mathematics) ,computer ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,computer.programming_language - Abstract
A data-driven automatic well planner procedure is implemented to develop complex well trajectories by efficiently adapting to near-well reservoir properties and geometry. The procedure draws inspiration from geosteering drilling operations, where modern logging-while-drilling tools enable the adjustment of well trajectories during drilling. Analogously, the proposed procedure develops well trajectories based on a selected geology-based fitness measure using an artificial neural network as the decision maker in a virtual sequential drilling process within a reservoir model. While neural networks have seen extensive use in other areas of reservoir management, to the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to apply neural networks on well trajectory design within reservoir models. Importantly, both the input data generation used to train the network and the actual trajectory design operations conducted by the trained network are efficient calculations, since these rely solely on geometric and initial properties of the reservoir, and thus do not require additional simulations. Therefore, the main advantage over traditional methods is the highly articulated well trajectories adapted to reservoir properties using a low-order well representation. Well trajectories generated in a realistic reservoir by the automatic well planner are qualitatively and quantitatively compared to trajectories generated by a differential evolution algorithm. Results show that the resulting trajectories improve productivity compared to straight line well trajectories, both for channelized and geometrically complex reservoirs. Moreover, the overall productivity with the resulting trajectories is comparable to well solutions obtained using differential evolution, but at a much lower computational cost.
- Published
- 2021
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