Generalized disjunctive programming for active produced water management

Abstract Active Produced Water Management (APWM) in oil and gas production aims to optimize produced water (PW) disposal operations to reduce environmental impacts while handling economic trade-offs. This paper proposes the design of an APWM strategy based on Generalized Disjunctive Programming (GDP). The proposed approach is able to manage conflicting interests between distinct agents present in a PW re-injection (PWRI) operation by combining disjunctive sets with logic propositions, measurement feedback, and predictive capability, forming an optimization feedback loop in which decisions are both in the discrete as well as continuous domain. We demonstrate that the optimization feedback loop leads to feasibility of long-term discharging environmental constraint while effectively allocating pumping energy for PW re-injection at an offshore production facility. Finally, a tuning parameter is introduced to the proposed APWM enabling one to manipulate the conservativeness of the solution. The proposed methodology can be extended to other settings in which improvements of pumping operation as well as long-term control of pollutant discharges is required.