Receding horizon control for oil reservoir waterflooding process

Abstract

Waterflooding is a recovery technique where water is pumped into an oil reservoir for increase in production. Changing reservoir states will require different injection and production settings for optimal operation which can be formulated as a dynamic optimization problem. This could be solved through optimal control techniques which traditionally can only provide an open-loop solution. However, this solution is sensitive to uncertainties which is inevitable to reservoirs. Direct feedback control has been proposed recently for optimal waterflooding operations with the aim to counteract the effects of reservoir uncertainties. In this work, a feedback approach based on the principle of receding horizon control (RHC) was developed for waterflooding process optimization. Application of RHC strategy to counteract the effect of uncertainties has yielded gains that vary from 0.14% to 19.22% over the traditional open-loop approach. The gain increases with introduction of more uncertainties into the configuration. The losses incurred as a result of the effect of feedback is in the range of 0.25%–15.21% in comparison to 0.39%–31.51% for the case of traditional open-loop control approach.