CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The optimal design of gathering networks for the unconventional oil and gas production is a relevant problem, particularly from the shale boom. In this work, we address an optimal pipeline network design problem in which the strategic decisions are the location and sizing of separation tank batteries together with the pipeline connections. The goal is to gather the oil, gas and water production from a large number of wellpads, being also possible to install junction nodes to merge the production in strategic points of the field. One major challenge is due to the steep production decline curves of unconventional wells, requiring continued turn-in-lines of new wells. To address this problem, we develop a complex multiperiod formulation to address the varying flows over the planning horizon. We aim to develop an optimization framework to obtain efficient solutions within reasonable computational times. To circumvent the computational burden due to the large-scale nonlinear and non-convex formulation required to model fluid dynamics in multiphase flows, we propose a solution algorithm, based on a bi-level decomposition. The results yield near optimal solutions for real-world instances, suggesting that the infrastructure planning can considerably improve the economics of unconventionals projects.