Decision-support methods for holistic water management (water value chain)

Short summary of the project

Water processing, treatment and injection systems are often bottlenecked, causing undesired reductions in hydrocarbon production, and are often the source of excessive costs and unplanned operational shutdowns. Also, they are a significant source of emissions to air and sea and energy usage, that impacts negatively the environmental footprint of oil and gas fields. In some situations, it is possible to pin-point specific problems in water handling systems (for example water breakthrough in a producer, injector plugging, emulsion formation, excessive shear while pumping, etc.) that can be alleviated with specific measures and technologies (for example injection of demulsifier, injector fracking, inflow control devices, etc.). However often there is a combination of complex issues that are responsible for the challenges. Additionally, the conditions evolve with reservoir depletion, so different solutions are often required at different times.

This project will focus on the development and evaluation of methods and tools to support water management operations by identifying bottlenecks and potential problems and finding suitable solutions, either by changing operational configurations and settings, or performing modifications to the system. The tools will consider the integrated system from topside facilities, transportation and injection and several technical and operational constraints. The work will be based on integrated modeling and will leverage numerical optimization and data science. Use cases will be established based on input from the industry partners interested.