Intelligent Well Technologies: Modeling, Design, Monitoring, and Control Optimization

Dear Colleagues,

Intelligent (smart or advanced or ‘flow control completion’) well (i-well) technology is being successfully used in thousands of wells worldwide. Dozens of companies are involved in manufacturing, modelling, installing, and optimizing i-well equipment. I-wells have their completion intervals divided into zones with packers, followed by the regulation of production or injection in each zone using flow control devices. This improves the well’s in/outflow profile and reduces production of unwanted fluids, resulting in increased oil or gas recovery.

The concept of i-well technology is around 25 years old and is still developing. While it is able to solve a wide range of problems, from local well-scale conformance issues to field-scale flood management, for the same reason, it requires addressing a wide range research tasks. This includes well completion design optimization studies, overall well and field production and injection optimization under uncertainty, complex wellbore flow modelling studies, well monitoring at the sandface level, etc.

Moreover, the design of downhole flow control devices is evolving too: the original family of passive, inflow control devices (ICDs) and active interval control valves (ICVs) was later joined by more fluid-viscosity-sensitive autonomous ICDs (AICDs) and inflow control devices (AICVs), while the new types (e.g., fluid-density-sensitive AICDs) are being developed and introduced. This results in continuing expansion of the application of intelligent well technology to ever more complex tasks and fields, making it amazingly resilient and adaptive both to the traditional oil and gas challenges, and to the new ones like thermal recovery, CO₂ EOR and  storage, etc.

This Special Issue will focus on intelligent well technologies, including their completion modeling, design, wellbore flow monitoring, and well and field control optimization aspects.

Topics of interest include:

Optimization of the sandface flow control completion design. This includes selection and placement of the right flow control devices and packers, single-bore and multilateral wells, conformance management, etc.

Wellbore flow modeling in advanced wells: both steady-state and transient; well-only and well- and reservoir-scale challenges.

Real-time monitoring, flow profiling, production logging, well integrity surveillance, and problem detection in intelligent wells. This includes both traditional and new types of sensors (e.g., fiber-optic), and both traditional and novel data interpretation techniques.

Well production and/or injection optimization with intelligent wells, both deterministic (i.e., using a single reservoir model realization) and under uncertainty (i.e., dealing with an ensemble of reservoir model realization, finding robust optimum strategies).

Active vs. passive and/or autonomous advanced well completions: comparative studies.

Dr. Khafiz Muradov
Dr. Morteza Haghighat Sefat
Prof. Dr. Britt Margrethe Emilie Moldestad
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Processes is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.