Optimization of Waterflooding Strategy Using Artificial Neural Networks

Waterflooding is the main technic to recover hydrocarbons in reservoirs. For a given set of wells (injectors and producers), the choice of injection/production parameters such as pressures, flow rates, and locations of these boundary conditions have a significant impact on the operating life of the wells. As a large number of combinations of these parameters are possible, one of the critical decision to make is to identify an optimal set of these parameters. Using the reservoir simulator directly to evaluate the impact of these sets being unrealistic considering the required number of simulations, a common approach consists of using response surfaces to approximate the reservoir simulator outputs. Several techniques involving proxies model (e.g., kriging, polynomial, and artificial neural network) have been suggested to replace the reservoir simulations. This paper focalizes on the application of artificial neural networks (ANN) as it is commonly admitted that the ANNs are the most efficient one due to their universal approximation capacity, i.e., capacity to reproduce any continuous function. This paper presents a complete workflow to optimize well parameters under waterflooding using an artificial neural network as a proxy model. The proposed methodology allows evaluating different production configurations that maximize the NPV according to a given risk. The optimized solutions can be analyzed with the efficient frontier plot and the Sharpe ratios. An application of the workflow to the Brugge field is presented in order to optimize the waterflooding strategy.