Optimal Strategy for Imperial Oil's Cold Lake Facilities

Abstract

Optimizing the performance of the entire Cold Lake system seems to be an impossible task at first. It was therefore decided that solving a scaled-down version of the problem would be more productive, and help understand the full problem better and identify suitable mathematical models.

The first part of the report summarizes the discussions and the models proposed for a four-well problem. Because the models are non-linear, one of their major draw-backs is that they quickly become very computationally expensive, and are impractical for the number of wells at Cold Lake.

The second part of the report discusses a new approach to the problem, where it has been formulated as a linear programming problem, and its size is independent on the number of wells. Results for a test case are presented.