A New Methodology for Minimizing Investment in the Development of Offshore Fields

Abstract

Summary The development of an offshore field is often a long, complex, and extremely expensive undertaking. The enormous amount of capital required for making investments of this type motivates one to try to "optimize" the development of a field. This paper provides an efficient computational method to minimize the initial investment in the development of a field. The problem of minimizing the investment in an offshore field is defined here as the problem of locating a number of offshore facilities and wells and allocating these wells to the facilities at minimum cost. Side constraints include restrictions on the total number of facilities of every type and design and various technology constraints. This problem is modeled as a 0/1 integer program. The solution method is based on an implicit enumeration scheme using efficient mathematical tools, such as Lagrangean relaxation and heuristics, to calculate "good" bounds and, consequently, to reduce the computation time. The solution method was implemented and tested on some typical field-development cases. Execution times were remarkably small for the size and complexity of the examples. Computational results indicate that the new methodology outperforms existing methods both in execution time and in memory required.