Multi-asset closed-loop reservoir management using deep reinforcement learning

• Published in: Computational geosciences 2024-02, Vol.28 (1), p.23-42
• Main Authors: Nasir, Yusuf, Durlofsky, Louis J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Closed loops; Deep learning; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Embedding; Flow simulation; Geology; Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences; History; Hydrogeology; Matching; Mathematical Modeling and Industrial Mathematics; Objective function; Optimization; Original Paper; Policies; Representations; Reservoir management; Reservoirs; Soil Science & Conservation; Well data
• ISSN: 1420-0597; 1573-1499
• DOI: 10.1007/s10596-023-10255-w

Closed-loop reservoir management (CLRM), in which history matching and production optimization are performed multiple times over the life of an asset, can provide significant improvement in the specified objective. These procedures are computationally expensive due to the large number of flow simulations required for history matching and optimization. Existing CLRM procedures are applied asset by asset, without taking advantage of similarities in geology or the temporal structure of well data across assets. Here, we develop a CLRM framework to treat multiple assets from related geological systems, which enables reductions in computational demands. Deep reinforcement learning is used to train a single global control policy that is applicable for all assets considered. The new framework is an extension of a recently introduced control policy methodology for individual assets. Embedding layers are incorporated into the representation to handle the different numbers of decision variables that arise for the different assets. Because the global control policy learns a unified representation of useful features from multiple related assets, it is less expensive to construct than asset-by-asset training (we observe about 3 × speedup in our examples). The production optimization problem includes a relative-change constraint on the well settings, which renders the results suitable for practical use. We apply the multi-asset CLRM framework to 2D and 3D water-flooding examples. In both cases, four assets with different well counts, well configurations, and geostatistical descriptions are considered. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the global control policy provides objective function values, for both the 2D and 3D cases, that are nearly identical to those from control policies trained individually for each asset. This promising finding suggests that multi-asset CLRM may indeed represent a viable practical strategy.