Smart Wells & Smart Fields

What are Smart Wells and Smart Fields?

Smart Well technology involves down-hole measurement and control of well bore and reservoir flow. Drilling and completion techniques have advanced significantly over the last years and allow for the drilling of complex multi-lateral and extended reach wells, and the installation of down-hole inflow control valves, measurement devices for flow, pressure and temperature, and processing facilities such as hydro-cyclones in the well bore.

Smart Fields technology involves the use of reservoir and production system models in a closed-loop fashion. The measurements may originate from sensors in smart wells, but could also involve simple surface measurements from conventional wells, or originate from other sources such as time-lapse seismics. 

Our work is focused on the development of concepts and algorithms to improve hydrocarbon production though the use of systems and control theory. In the Petroleum Engineering section we primarily address the reservoir management aspects on time scales from months to many years, and in particular the development of techniques for Closed-Loop Reservoir Management.

Further reading

• Closed-Loop Reservoir Management - home page
• All our Smart-Wells/Fields-related publications
• All our Smart Wells/Fields related PhD dissertations
• Model-based optimization of oil and gas production
  Tutorial presented at the IPAM Long Workshop on Computational Issues in Oil Field Applications. Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), USA (20 March-9 June 2017).
• Control and optimization of sub-surface flow
  Keynote speech at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 25 February - 1 March, 2013.