Lexicographic optimization of multiple economic objectives in oil production from petroleum reservoirs

In oil production waterflooding is a popular recovery technology, which involves the injection of water into an oil reservoir. Studies on model-based dynamic optimization of waterflooding strategies have demonstrated that there is a significant potential to increase life-cycle performance, determined using an economic objective function. However, in these studies the additional desire of many oil companies to maximize daily production is generally neglected. To resolve this, a lexicographic optimization structure is proposed that regards economic life-cycle performance as primary objective and daily production as secondary objective. The existence of redundant degrees of freedom allows for the optimization of the secondary objective without compromising optimality of the primary objective.