Robust optimization of oil reservoir flooding

Over the recent years a variety of new developments have been introduced within the field of oil recovery, with the aim to maximize production of oil and gas from petroleum reservoirs. One of these new developments is the introduction of so-called “smart wells”, which are equipped with control valves to actively control the oil production. The optimal operational strategy of these control valves can be found using a dynamic optimization procedure. However, due to geological uncertainty inherent to reservoir modelling, the mismatch between the reservoir model and the real reservoir may become considerable. As a result, a model-based optimal solution may seize to be the optimal, but will yield sub-optimal or even worse results. Within this work a robust optimization approach is presented that takes the possibly large impact of the mismatch between model and reservoir into account using a set of multiple reservoir realizations.