Conservation Production in an Oil Reserve, a Quantitative Approach Using Genetic Algorithm Optimization

Despite the decrease in the share of oil in the world's energy basket, the absolute amount of oil consumption is still increasing. Oil is at the center of the economic and political developments and countries with the oil and gas deposits are trying to maximize their benefit from these reserves. In Iran, there have been many policies and legislations related to optimizing the value and volume of the oil and gas reserve. The term "conservation production" has been mentioned several times in several legislations and guidelines however, it is still ambiguous as to how to implement this framework. This research has sought to use the real data of an oil reservoir (with periods of natural depletion, primary production, secondary and tertiary recovery), different objective functions (reservoir net present value and final recovery factor), and the effect of changes in the optimization period to model the concept of conservation production. The results show that the changes in the objective function and the optimization periods would have a significant effect on the production path.