In this article, we study shale gas pad development under natural gas price uncertainty. We optimize the sequence of operations, gas curtailment, and storage on a single pad to maximize the net present value. The optimization problem is formulated as an mixed‐integer linear programming model, which is similar to the one proposed by Ondeck et al. We investigate how natural gas price uncertainty affects the operation strategy in the pad development. Both two‐stage and multistage stochastic programming are used as the mathematical framework to hedge against uncertainty. Our case study shows that there is value of using stochastic programming when the price variance is high. However, when the variance of the price is low, solving the stochastic programming problems does not create additional value compared with solving the deterministic problem.

中文翻译：

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价格不确定性下的页岩气垫开发规划

在本文中，我们研究了天然气价格不确定性下的页岩气垫开发。我们优化操作顺序，减少气体消耗和在单个垫上存储，以使净现值最大化。优化问题被表述为一个混合整数线性规划模型，与Ondeck等人提出的模型相似。我们调查天然气价格不确定性如何影响垫开发中的操作策略。两阶段和多阶段随机规划都被用作对冲不确定性的数学框架。我们的案例研究表明，当价格差异很大时，使用随机规划是有价值的。但是，当价格差异较小时，与解决确定性问题相比，解决随机规划问题不会产生额外的价值。