Well management in the North Sea

The purpose of this paper is to describe a planning model for the management of approximately 130 petroleum-producing wells in the North Sea. The objective is to form a better basis for the decisions about which wells to produce from and which to shut down during a period. Every well is dealt with individually as the production potential and chemical composition are different. The total flow consists of six saleable components: gas, four NGL products, and oil. The production may be curtailed due to the capacities of the platforms, gathering centre, pipelines and refinery plants. The total gas production is available for fulfilling the gas contracts, injecting the gas into the reservoirs or using the gas as fuel. There exist contracts for some of the NGL products, while the rest of the NGL products and oil are sold on the free market. The well-management model is solved by means of a standard mathematical programming code, and computational results are given for a planning problem with four different data sets.