Developing an improved approach to solving a new gas lift optimization problem

The increased speed and accuracy in solving optimization problems of gas allocation in the gas lift process are of high importance. Solving gas allocation optimization problems generally involves two steps: (1) The gas lift performance curve (GLPC) fitting (gas lift modeling) and (2) optimizing the allocation of gas between wells. Therefore, in order to increase the speed and accuracy of solving gas allocation optimization problems, both steps need to be improved. In order to increase the accuracy of the first step, a new correlation was proposed in which, in addition to increasing the accuracy of fit, the optimization speed was improved by decreasing the number of constants used in the correlation. Besides, in order to improve the performance of the second step, water cycle optimization algorithm was used and the results obtained from this algorithm were compared with the results obtained from previous studies on teaching–learning-based optimization (TLBO) algorithm, continuous ant colony (CACO) algorithm, genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) for solving the five-well Nishikiori index problem. The results suggested that the water cycle optimization algorithm has a very good performance in terms of convergence rate, non-capture at local optimum points and repeatability. Finally, as a new problem, the gas allocation between the wells of one of the heavy oil fields in the southwest of Iran was optimized with predetermined oil production rates. The goal of optimization was to obtain the minimum amount of gas required to produce the predetermined oil rates using the water cycle optimization algorithm. The results showed that optimization is of higher importance in lower oil production targets, resulting in higher additional oil production.