It is an established fact that substantial amounts of oil usually remain in a reservoir after primary and secondary processes. Therefore; there is an ongoing effort to sweep that remaining oil. Field optimization includes many techniques. Horizontal wells are one of the most motivating factors for field optimization. The selection of new horizontal wells must be accompanied with the right selection of the well locations. However, modeling horizontal well locations by a trial and error method is a time consuming method. Therefore; a method of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been employed which helps to predict the optimum performance via proposed new wells locations by incorporating reservoir properties and production data of previous wells.
This study used the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) that has been programmed in a manner to predict the cumulative oil produced for a certain grid by providing the corresponding properties of the grid. The network has been validated with real data collected from a number of drilled hypothetical wells. Furthermore; the validated network used to simulate the field parts that have not been drilled yet, to predict the corresponding cumulative oil for each grid. Field-scale simulation has been carried out and new horizontal wells have been allocated using the validated prepared data by the Artificial Neural Network Algorithm and an approved Iraqi reservoir model. Finally, different optimization scenarios have been investigated on the overall field recovery performance.