Abstract—The demand for the total production of oil from an Electric Submersible Pump (ESP) lifted oil field may vary with time. It may not always be economically profitable to use all of the available oil wells for varying production rates. Depending on the amount of oil to be produced from the oil field, some of the oil wells may have to be shut down. The number of oil wells to be used should be properly selected. Not only the number of oil wells should be known, but which wells to use should also be exactly identified. The operating speed of the ESP and the production choke valve opening of each selected oil well should be optimally chosen so that the profit from the oil field is maximized by keeping the operational expenses at the minimum. The oil well scheduling problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem. The cost of the electrical power consumed by the pumps, the operational cost of separation process and the income from the oil production are considered for the MINLP formulation. In the first part of the paper, the production choke valves are always fully opened and the number of wells and their respective pump speeds are calculated for varying total production flow rates. However, in the second half of the paper, it is shown that the operation of the oil field can be improved in terms of power consumption through production valve choking.
Index Terms—Mixed integer nonlinear programming, ESP lifted oil field, well scheduling, optimal operation, production valve choking.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Information Technology and Cybernetics, Telemark University College, Porsgrunn, Norway (e-mail: roshan.sharma@hit.no, bjorn.glemmestad@hit.no).
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Cite: Roshan Sharma and Bjørn Glemmestad, "Mixed Integer Nonlinear Optimization for ESP Lifted Oil Field and Improved Operation through Production Valve Choking," International Journal of Modeling and Optimization vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 465-475, 2014.
