gas-lifted oil production, optimization, dynamic programming.

Abstract – The ever-increasing demand for nonrenewable resources and the pressure from stockholders are two forces pressing the oil industry for higher efficiency. The opportunities for advances abound in all sectors of the industry, in particular production processes in gas-lift oil wells, which are often favored to draw oil from high-depth reservoirs. Of concern in this paper is the task of distributing the limited supply of gas to the wells so as to induce an optimal oil production. Narrowing this task to the steady-state response of the wells gives rise to the gas-lift optimization problem, whose variables decide which wells should be active as well as the gas-injection and whose objective is profit maximization. The paper elaborates on a few properties of the problem and delivers a dynamic-programming algorithm to find approximate solutions. The effectiveness of the algorithm was demonstrated by contrasting its solutions against upper bounds obtained with continuous relaxation. As closure, the paper outlines a few directions for future research