Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Pressure Management and Optimal Well Pattern for Steamflooding

Summary A model-based workflow is presented for computable decision under uncertainty (DUU). The workflow can generate solutions to mitigate subsurface and operational uncertainties for transparent and robust decision-making. It consists of scenario generation, physics-based modeling, uncertainty assessment, economic analysis, and solution mining. A behavioral economics theory, cumulative prospect theory (CPT), is considered in the workflow to account for the effect of uncertainties on overall economics and decision. A decision tree is generated by mining the simulation results to inform decisions that make full sense in physics and in economics. The usefulness of this workflow is illustrated with an exemplary problem in steamflooding for heavy-oil recovery. The results show that the introduction of CPT for some cases may change the decision that was made on the basis of conventional expected utility theory (EUT).